Dressing with Fibro!

So Fibro doesn’t just disrupt your sleep and nerves, it crams itself into every part of your life that it can weasel its asshole way into.

Today I am still feeling yesterday’s flare, so I’m already sore, plus I had a really busy day yesterday then didn’t sleep well, so today’s own flare is also ramping itself up. These things factor into both what I wear and how I actually put said clothes on. We’ll start with how I select what I’m going to wear in the winter.

Because my particular flavor of Fibro makes me cold sensitive, I have to get myself warm as a baseline, plus be able to add on layers as needed. I’ve been wearing sweater tights, but today the weather got almost to the 60s, so I skipped the tights. So the initial need is warmth, but then there’s the added issue of the flares. Not only am I really sore today like I ran a crazy biathalon yesterday, but I’m also puffy, pretty much from the neck down. That means not only do I have to pick clothes out that are slightly looser, but I have to avoid anything that pinches or is too scratchy.

It’s a pain in the…everything.

OK we’ve covered WHAT we’re going to wear, but how do I get that glorious clothing on my glorious body? When things are bad enough, the pain makes even getting my underwear on difficult. The very first thing is that I absolutely can’t have cold hands. Touching myself with cold hands is as painful as touching myself with cold anything else, even when they’re my own hands. Once my hands are warm (I will usually just wash them with really hot water.) then I have to decide how much my hands themselves hurt. Why? Because when my hands get bad enough, I can’t put on my bra normally. Between grasping both halves of the back and then stretching both arms behind my back both arms will cramp up to my elbows. Fun, right? No? Wimp. The solution to that is to clasp the bra around my waist and backwards, then flip it around and pull it up. It’s probably one of the LEAST sexy “Woman getting dressed” scenes ever in the history of women getting dressed.

The last two pain-avoidance methods for getting dressed are as follows: I have to make sure my belt is up above my hips before I cinch it, otherwise it will dig into them which is INCREDIBLY painful, and if my legs are really hurting then sometimes I’ll get dressed while sitting down.

There you have it, dear readers. One of those parts of life that you wouldn’t expect Fibro to make a negative difference, but it does.