Suffering in silence: Fibromyalgia is an invisible and misdiagnosed disorder

It’s an invisible disorder that can change your life. A Winnipeg woman who suffers from Fibromyalgia is sharing her story so that Canadians who suffer in silence seek the help they need.

“Inside we feel like we’re bruised everywhere. We can feel it, it’s real pain and it’s not in our heads,” said Preslee Marshall.

“When I wake up, I’m extremely tired every day. That causes stress throughout the day, and stress triggers Fibromyalgia, giving me pain. While pain is different for everybody, for me personally it feels like I’m getting electrocuted. It’s like an electric shock all the way through my body. Every part of my body: my gums, my eyes, my ears, my feet.

“That just goes on and off all day.”

Marshall, 25, was diagnosed a year ago. She says the journey to diagnosis was hard. And at first, she didn’t know what Fibromyalgia was.

“A lot of doctors I saw didn’t take it seriously or said that it was all in my head. I actually saw a neurologist once who told me to get my nails done and get my hair done and I would feel better the next day,” she said. “So I left pretty upset.

“And I actually, that month, I got my hair done, my nails done, I got a massage, I got a facial, and I still felt awful.”

Marshall says she waited six months for that appointment with a neurologist and was feeling helpless. Even friends couldn’t understand her internal pain that was gradually worsening from experiencing the pain once a month, to 30 times a day.

“‘You seem good to me,'” she recounted people saying. “It’s one of those invisible conditions that people suffer from young and old. People who don’t have it, it’s hard for them to believe.”

Dr. Andrea Furlan, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, says Fibromyalgia is actually very easy to diagnose, but a lot of physicians don’t get the proper training about the disorder in school.

“When you examine them, they are very sensitive to touch. If you palpate them, press, like even a hug hurts,” said Furlan.

Furlan has trained 600 physicians in rural Ontario to detect the disorder over the past eight years and says the best doctor to see is a family doctor.

She says if you experience any symptoms, don’t wait to get checked out.

“The more you delay the diagnosis and the treatment, this pain system gets more and more dysfunctional,” she said. “If it takes too many years for you to diagnose, you already missed 15 years that you could have fixed the pain system.”

May is Fibromyalgia awareness month, and Marshall hopes others afflicted with the disorder can seek help quickly to avoid worsening symptoms.