Farewell from the Fibromyalgia Network
Everyone with fibromyalgia knows what if feels like when doctors dismiss their symptoms or when job demands become too overwhelming to stay employed. Your life’s work is on the line, but the system is not designed to care.
For 25 years I’ve been writing articles for Fibromyalgia Network, hoping the information would help you better understand this illness and empower you to receive the proper treatment for it. Somewhere along the way, the Network became my life’s mission. While I know it is not healthy to have one’s self-worth wrapped up in a job, my writing has never been a job to me. I love reading the research papers and reporting on all things fibro.
During the first few months of 2011, I began experiencing neurological symptoms that were diagnosed as a mild form of epilepsy in June of that year. I was placed on anti-seizure medications and began to feel much better. Then my unusual symptoms reappeared in 2012. Adjustments to my treatment helped for a while, but recently I have gotten progressively worse.
Inability to get help for my ongoing neurological illness has left me with no other choice than to shut down the Network. I wish I could promise you that I would be better in six months, putting the Fibromyalgia Network on “pause” and just picking it up where I left off. But I have no idea if (or when) I will get my function back, and have never been successful in finding or training someone to write the articles. Thus, the Fibromyalgia Network will not be publishing any more editions.
I am trying to do what I can and plan to provide additional information on this website as it becomes available. In the meantime, please feel free to visit the Network’s Facebook page. Rest assured that our strict privacy policy will remain and your information will never be sold.
Thank you for all of your years of support and feedback. I particularly want to express my gratitude to those of you who worked with me on the six-year grassroots advocacy campaign during the 1990s to get research funding for fibro at the National Institutes of Health. I feel as though we have been through a lot together and you have helped make the Network such a success since 1988.
Wishing you the very best,
Kristin Thorson, Editor