Welcome to my little blog. This is my first post, which I’ve put off writing for quite some time. But today, I really need to get some stuff out there.

I’m home sick, for the fourth day in a row, my 16th absence this year. Why? Not H1N1. Fibromyalgia pain. It’s not that the pain is so bad I can’t function, it’s that the pain is so bad that I can’t be patient or watch my tongue as much as is needed of a math/special ed teacher. I worry that I’ll soon be asked to resign. The frustration and loneliness of being home all day increases my pain. At least it’s Friday, so I don’t have to worry about staying on schedule, sleep-wise.

The thing is, I didn’t schedule my life this way. By now, we were supposed to be settled into our jobs and home, with 2 kids and discussing having a 3rd. After grad school, I got married. During my 2nd year of teaching, we decided to try to get pregnant. It didn’t work out, and neither did my job. That’s when my life began to derail. I figured we’d wait a year, while we moved to Maryland from Western NY so I could be the head of the math dept at a school for underprivileged, college-bound students in grades 5-12 with language-based learning disabilities. However, after 6 months, I was diagnosed with fibromyalia, which steadily got worse until I could no longer teach and, eventually, no longer function on a day-to-day basis. All of this moving around and the recession ate our savings and half my nest-egg.

So now, I probably won’t have a job by the new year and my husband wants to move closer to family and friends. I want to live elsewhere as well, but moving would be difficult… cleaning up and selling our home, paying for movers, getting new jobs and a new place to live… Oh, yeah, and we have to buy christmas presents for everyone and pay for travel.

I’m not going to worry about my neurologist appointment on Sunday – he’ll either repeat I have fibromyalgia and radiculopathy (weird, unbalanced, under- and over-reactive nerves in my arms and legs) or, based on the MRI results of my brain and neck, he’ll say I have something else that we can’t do much about.

But I’m going to cocoon myself in a stress-free environment by reading and sleeping and watching TV. When my husband comes home, maybe we’ll go to dinner. I hope we’ll see a movie and do something fun tomorrow.

I’m a 29-year-old woman. I was born in Westchester County, NY (an hour north of NYC, on the border of Greenwich, CT), went to college in central NY state and settled in Rochester, NY. I have been married for nearly 6 years to a wonderful, supportive man, whom I met at college 10 years ago. We are the slaves of two 7-year-old siamese cats, Stewie and Leela.

I love to read (mostly romance novels, but also mysteries, classics, and anything else I get my hands on), I love to learn, I adore languages,and I can be a little silly.

I have wanted to be a math teacher since I was 2. And, as the daughter of two neuropsychologists and the sister of a third, I am also special-education-certified with coursework in neuropsychology. I began teaching at the age of 24, after getting a double M.S. in mathematics education and teaching students with disabilities from middle childhood through adolescence (4 NYS certifications). Until now, I’ve worked exclusively at semi-private schools for students with learning-disabilities-plus. Now, I work at a public school, teaching applied algebra to students who have barely passed Algebra 1 and Geometry, which feels very similar to my previous work except that my class size sextupled.

Unfortunately, I also have fibromyalgia, which has interfered with my home and work life significantly over the past 4 years. This is a Add to that a clinical diagnosis of “Major Depressive Disorder” with a side of mild anxiety, which I have had as long as I can remember. In the spring, I was hospitalized and (since no cocktail of meds we’ve tried for the past 13 years had been effective for me) received ECT treatments. As a result, I have barely any memory of Spring 2008-Spring 2009. This affects my daily life as much as the fibromyalgia pain. It was like I woke up and someone else had been using my body… poorly. Although my fibromyalgia was in remission (what stress can there be, when you have no daily memory for a month?), I was over 50 lbs heavier than I remembered being.

So, I felt better and decided to return to the classroom, hopefully in a public school, teaching what I love. That happened, but at first my body ached from the increased muscle use, and then with increased stress, my fibromyalgia began to flare.