Steven's Testimony
My fibromyalgia started at the age of twelve when I was misdiagnosed as having rheumatic fever. For the next two years I ran a light fever, was extremely tired, felt lethargic and was bedridden with constant muscle aches and intermittent sharp pains. My thought process was foggy at best. Growth pains and hormones run amuck I was told.
In following years I had other symptoms. I was easily winded. I couldn't breath through my nose. My feet were always sore. I couldn't swim without becoming exhausted. I quit dreaming, I slept poorly. I was easily agitated and I had many other fibro symptoms.
At 23 I developed an intermittent painfully sore neck problem in my seventh vertebrae. I was told I'd someday be paraplegic. Both of my knees made loud cracking sounds, eventually requiring fluid extraction and cortisone shots. Unusual amounts of plaque built up on the back of my teeth. My jaw cracked painfully when I chewed gum or meat.
By the age of 26 I started having short bouts of depression. By 30 I had longer and longer bouts of depression, which turned into daily depression that lasted nearly thirty more years. For twenty-five years took sleep medication and higher and higher doses of painkillers.
In 1990 I was referred to a psychiatrist because my many specialist doctors believed my aches, pains, and repeated and medically unsubstantiated health problems were not real, but instead in my head. For the next four years I was highly medicated and treated for manic-depressive disease. I was mostly bedridden with long bouts of depression, I couldn't drive and when awake I was easily agitated.
In 1994 at the age of 47 when Doctors at Honolulu Kaiser Permanente couldn't tell me "what I was dying of" I went to the Mayo Clinic, located in Rochester, Minnesota, where I was diagnosed as having a relatively new disease called Fibromyalgia, formerly "Fibrosis". I was told there was no known cure, I wouldn't get worse, and that fibromyalgia wouldn't kill me. I was told to live with it.
For the next eleven years I did get worse, and worse and worse, often thinking my next day would be my last. I told friends and family, "Every day I feel like a one hundred eight year old man who has been run over by an 18 wheel truck". Life sucked and I wanted to die, but I was too tired to kill myself.
In 2005, at the age of 58, after suffering from fibromyalgia for 46 years I attended an Ifog sponsored Dr. R. Paul St. Amand lecture and told my wife, "He has what I have". I taped Dr. St. Amands lecture and immediately began his "guifenesin protocol". Soon after I attended monthly Honolulu Ifog meetings. Within three years I was nearly 100% fibromyalgia symptom free.
Thanks to the "guifenesin protocol" I felt well, slept well and began a regular walking routine. I eventually walked 20 or more miles each day.
In 2011 I was hospitalized with a rare blood cancer named "Waldenstroms". Doctors said I should have died, but thanks to the prayers from Ifog members, the "guifenesin protocol" and a good exercise program, I survived. I credit Dr. St. Amand with saving my life twice, from Fibromyalgia and from Waldenstroms.