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"I basically was
hurting all over all the time with throbbing pain," Barbara Redmond says,
describing her ordeal with fibromyalgia.
Redmond, 40, of
Lewisburg, Tennessee, was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in 1986. It came at a
time in her life when she was raising two small children.
"My husband was taking care of a lot of things that I would normally do
because it was so very difficult for me to function," she recalls. "If I did
the dishes it would take two hours. I would have to go rest in the middle
and then get up and finish them. I even had trouble combing my hair. I would
get muscle spasms in my legs that were terrible. Walking was a problem, and
sometimes I had to use a cane. I even had trouble speaking sometimes because
the pain was so intense. It drained me. I just had to go to bed.
"It was so hard for
my children to see me like that. My son, who was eight at the time, wanted
to stay home and take care of me. The pain was so bad sometimes that I
prayed for death to take me."
She took Elavil, an
antidepressant, at night to fall asleep. She also used pain pills. Prior to
her diagnosis of fibromyalgia, she had taken cortisone and gold for
rheumatoid arthritis. |
"I believe that all the medicines
weakened me in some way and contributed to the fibromyalgia," Redmond says.
Redmond was luckier than most
people who suffer for many years with fibromyalgia. Three months after her
diagnosis she came to the Portland clinic and started a regimen of five
grams of MSM daily.
"MSM reversed my direction," she
says. "Within a matter of a week, I started to feel less pain and slowly
regained my ability to function more normally again."
Along with the MSM she also did
muscle therapy, slowly started to exercise, and watched her diet. She took
pain pills if she needed them, which was mostly in the beginning. Sometimes
if she had muscle spasms she would take muscle relaxants.
"But basically MSM has taken the
pain down to a level where I can function again," she says. "It's down to
about 10 percent of what it was before. I'm happy with that. I can take care
of my family and do what I enjoy doing."
Today, Richmond works as an
inventory specialist, a job that sometimes requires her to climb up and down
ladders and audit inventory in large stores.
"I could never have done anything
physical like that, but I can do it now as long as I keep taking the MSM,"
she says.
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