Dr. Allan Horowitz, published newspaper article, Richmond Hill Liberal, Copyright July 11, 1990

Dear readers:

As promised, today I will bring you a very moving letter from a reader who wrote regarding a series of articles I did last year on a disease known as “fibrositis.”

Dear Dr. Horowitz:

            I am sorry this is such a lengthy letter but you did ask for replies and thank God, Dr. Horowitz, someone finally addressed this topic. I don’t completely agree with your article and I’ll tell you why later, but I beg you to please be patient with me because this is the most important letter I have written in my life. I hope I can stop crying long enough to write this, for such awful memories are flooding back into my mind.

I am a life-long sufferer of this dreadful illness and I feel I must offer some rebuttal to your article, but first let me say that I was moved to tears to finally see this horrific disease receive some media attention. Why? Because your column exposed one of the most dangerous effects of fibrositis, one that I never heard discussed before, not to my face that is, but behind my back, always and for years! Hypochondriac.

Hypochondriac! That’s what everyone thinks you are – and I mean everyone from your doctors, friends, family and most tragically, your spouse. You get labeled and labeled fast. My God, most MDs don’t know a thing about the big F, but they can quickly tell you that you are nothing but a nervous young mother and you shouldn’t let life get you down.

Oh yes, another great “cop out” is blamed on your marriage and sex life. It got to the point that if one more doctor hinted at a troubled marriage or sex, my husband was going to do some bodily harm. I think that is the final straw in the other spouse’s acceptance of this illness. After years of doctors making the same idiotic innuendos about one’s mate, he/she realizes that his/her loved one couldn’t possibly put her/himself and everyone else in the family through this hell for so long if the hurt wasn’t real.

One wouldn’t have the stamina if it was faked. This drains every bit of energy out of you every single day. You may only have a few hours a day without fatigue so you make the most of them. You don’t socialize in the evenings any more and having people over for dinner is out of the question now – you’re just too tired.

Depression? You came down heavy about depression. I asked other readers about your article and we all agreed that it sounds like a fibrositis patient is quite unstable to begin with. That’s baloney and you know it! I know, I know it’s not what you meant, but it came out all wrong.

DEPRESSED

            Depressed! Damned right we are depressed and why in hell wouldn’t one be! Wouldn’t you be depressed from constant non-stop pain, day in and day out and, at the same time being treated as a total idiot by everyone?

Readers, this is Dr. H. again. I think you now get the thrust of this lady’s letter and understand how frustrating this condition is for some people. This letter was written with such emotion that I couldn’t and wouldn’t dare cut one word from it.

For the next two weeks, I will be running the rest of the letter which says more about the overall effects on one’s life from fibrositis than I or any text book ever could.

Tune in again next week for more.