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.