Fibromyalgia Update

Fact for today:  fibromyalgia is one of a hundred forms of arthritis.

So let me tell you about some of the positives of having fibromyalgia.  You get to eat, sleep and be exhausted all day.  That's pretty much where my condition is right now.

The time you are awake you feel so fatigued you cannot accomplish much.  Doing things in sections like chores is the only way I can manage.  Loading the dishwasher: prepare dirty dishes, sit down, load half of the dirty dishes, sit down, finish loading, sit down. 

Forget about doing laundry for your family - you might be able to do one load with everyone's underwear and/or socks.  That still leaves piles of clothes doesn't it?  Yah and it takes forever to get to the rest of it.  Small jobs like: sort laundry, sit down, load washer, sit down, put in dryer, sit down, unload clothes and sort, sit down.  They don't always get put away though - may take a week sometimes.

The great thing about my teenage daughter - she's at the stage now where she wants to smell/look good so she'll throw in laundry as well.  She may only do a load of her own clothes, but heh, that saves me the energy to do a load.  My daughter has been doing most of the laundry (towels definitely every few days) while I worked.  Now that I'm off I try and do what I can but she's so terrific - I couldn't have worked this long without her help doing chores.  I haven't washed a floor in years - she's done them.  It kills me to know I can't do these things and then if I feel guilty it causes more stress - aggravating the fibromyalgia even more.

Are you wondering about the pain? Well that was in remission prior to this flare up, however, it is now back. Major pain in different areas of the body - piercing, aching, stabbing, radiating, intense burning, throbbing, shooting and deep muscular aching.


As I try and get myself back to where I am able to work full time, I am working on our family history.  Went to geneology.com on the Net - I'd started a page years ago and have hardly had the time to go work on finding relatives of my father Johann.

This is what I do know:

My father, Johann Schmalz, was born in 1919 in Russia near the Kuban River near a city called Krasnador(before 1920 was named - Ekaterinodar after Katherine the Great. Dad was born in Semenovka south of the Kuban River. He had 10 brothers and sisters and his father, Georg Schmalz (born 1883-1919) died 2 weeks prior to my dad's birth on January 13th. My grandfather Georg Schmalz, lost both his parents by the time he was 18.

At one point my dad's mother, Klara Schmalz (nee Zwenger DOB: 1884), was sent to Siberia for hiding food in the family farm's well...around 1930. Her father, my grandfather, was once thrown in jail for praying for rain during a drought.

So if you can help me find some ancestors, that'd be great!

Now it's nap time....