A bad spell, and

On a personal note, I'm going through a rough patch right now. My fingers object to me doing almost anything, my neck and back are screaming constantly, and I feel worse rather than better after working out. I'm creaking and in pain, and I'm trying desperately to hold it together with my spouse going TDY in a few weeks. The kid's therapy will be interrupted and I need to try to coordinate another therapist being able to see him across the country. I need more than ever to be two people, and I'm too tired and in too much pain to be even all of one.

OK, thanks.

Aside from that, there's something important I'd like to bring to your attention. As most of my readers (both of you) know, many pain doctors are very reluctant to prescribe pain medication. They cite supposed dangers of pain medication (though opioids taken correctly are less dangerous even than the "innocuous" carrier drugs many of the mildest are paired with, ibuprofen and acetominophen) and threat of addiction, or worry that patients with chronic nonspecified pain like Fibromyalgia may be faking to get drugs that make them high (there are far easier ways--if I want an illicit high, it would be far easier and more effective to score some marijuana, but I'm generally a fairly law-abiding citizen).

What doctors need to know is that recent research shows that there are dangers to leaving chronic pain untreated. In their study "Beyond feeling: chronic pain hurts the brain, disrupting the default-mode network dynamics," several Northwestern University doctors discovered that under the constant input of chronic pain, the brain rewires itself, bypassing some critical areas involving memory and emotion. Another study by the same team shows that brain mass is actually lost by patients dealing with long-term chronic pain, particularly in areas dealing with pain perception and response and with interpreting data and decision-making.

Patients with long-term chronic pain have long known that "brain fog" is one of the results of living this way. Now it turns out that making us suffer through it is causing brain damage, as well.