Category: Personal Experience

My life with fibromyalgia

Best Kept Secret: WEGO Health Nominee

I use my blog and health advocacy role to shine a light on fibromyalgia and make this condition more visible.

I started blogging a few years ago to share my fibromyalgia journey in the hopes of encouraging, helping, or inspiring others. I try to maintain a positive attitude despite this sometimes debilitating condition. My blogging journey has been slow and not always steady due these limitations, so this nomination caught me completely off-guard. I am honored, thrilled, and grateful for being nominated for a 2018 WEGO Health Award for the “Best Kept Secret.” It truly gives validation to what I am trying to accomplish in my little corner of the blog-o-sphere and Twitter-verse.

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Change Your Mindset – Ease Your Pain

You have the power to decide whether to let the pain control you, or you control the pain and its effect on you.

If you could change one thing in your life to ease your pain, what would it be? Diet? Exercise? A new doctor or the latest medication, perhaps? I believe the single biggest factor in helping ourselves is our attitude. Diet, exercise, and life style choices are great too, but you have to have the proper mindset for those things to work.Change Your Mindset Continue reading “Change Your Mindset – Ease Your Pain”

My Skin Cancer Scare

I always thought it was unfair to still be experiencing wrinkles AND acne into my 40s and 50s.

As May comes to a close and we celebrate Memorial Day here in the United States, it is the unofficial start of summer. With BBQs and trips to the lake or beach upon us, I wanted to write about something other than fibromyalgia, but still something near and dear to my heart. May is Skin Cancer Awareness month. I became aware of this disease as a little girl, since it has plagued my mom’s side of the family. She grew up in a beach town back in the days when they used baby oil on their skin in the summer. Fair skin + no protection + summers in the sun = Disaster.

My first recollection of skin cancer was when I was about 8 years old at one of my ballet recitals. My mom had to wear a big floppy hat to protect her face. She had just had surgery to remove skin cancer, which took part of an eyebrow and had she waited any longer for treatment, she was told she would have lost her eye. Since then she’s had multiple surgeries – nose, scalp, ear. And she is facing two more surgeries in the next few weeks. My aunt, grandmother, and my oldest brother have all had a few removed. We are the fair-skinned ones in the family. Because of this my mother instilled in me at that very early age to take care of my skin. I think of using sunscreen as one of those things that everyone knows they should do, but often don’t take the time. SPF is your friend!

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10 Things to Inspire – Fibromyalgia Awareness Day

I have fibromyalgia. It does not have me.

May 12th each year has been designated as Fibromyalgia Awareness Day. For most of us suffering with Fibromyalgia Syndrome every day is really awareness day, as explaining this condition to others is part of the game. It is a “silent condition” that it is ill-understood. We don’t always look sick, but we may be exhausted, in pain, and suffering silently from one of the hundreds of symptoms associated with this. Fibrowarriors many of us call ourselves, as we just keep on keeping on. People may have heard the term from a drug commercial on TV or from the news of Lady Gaga cancelling part of her tour, but do they really understand it?


My mantra is: “I have fibromyalgia. It does not have me.” Cynthia Baughman

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