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My nightmare began at the end of 1996. At 25 I was what society would consider healthy. I ate what I thought was a well balanced diet and I was fit and very active. I felt good, had a great boyfriend, now husband, and life was good.. How drastically everything would change. I started to fall ill. Terribly ill. It began with a migraine that came one day and never left. Accompanying the migraine was a pain at the base of my skull and severe muscle tightness, and pain. My muscles in my neck and shoulders became as hard as rocks and nothing would relax them. Over the next six years I would bounce from various types of doctors and specialists in the allopathic medical community (conventional medicine). No doctor could help me and my list of symptoms kept getting longer. Added to the debilitating migraines and muscle tightness, fatigue and pain was.. 50lb weight gain, extreme excitability/nervousness, panic attacks, shortness of breath, great loss of libido, painful intercourse, fibrocystic breasts, irregular heart beat, chronic sinus infections and yeast infections, lowered immune system and more. My body was falling apart. I felt like a 20-something trapped in the body of an 80 year old.. But not a healthy 80 year old, a dying 80 year old.I was taking all of the drugs the doctors were prescribing to me but none of them helped me. In fact, they only made my condition worse. I was suicidal from the pain. I was merely existing, not living. All the while I was trying to 'pretend' to family and friends that I was 'all right'. I had to go about daily life.. I had to function. No x-ray, mri, ctscan or blood test could find anything wrong with me. Every test said 'you are not sick'... but I was in torturous pain. If I had to go around family and friends I would take Excedrin migraines, make my appearance, and then come home and drop in exhaustion from the pain and pretending. Sometimes pretending to feel 'good' was harder than living in pain. My husband watched me cry every day from the pain. My muscles were so hard, so sore, he couldn't even touch me to massage me to try and alleviate some of the pain. Thank God for a wonderful man! He stuck by me every step of the way and helped me with everything. Normal every day chores, like washing the dishes caused me terrible pain. I would have to the dishes sitting on a stool because my legs were to sore to hold me up. I could not bend over to tie my shoes without an intense feeling of strangulation. I would start to black out every time I bent over. My husband would tie my shoes for me many days as just tilting my head downward would cause me to feel as if I was going to pass out. I also started to loss feeling in my face and my extremities. One day it was so bad my mother thought I was having a stroke and rushed me to the doctor. After about 10 minutes in his office the symptoms started to subside. This loss of feeling would come and go over a period of a couple of years but my doctor could never find a 'reason' as to why it was happening.
I was eventually told by a doctor that he thought I had Fibromyalgia and that it was incurable. He said he could give me drugs to make it a little more 'livable', but that it could not be cured. I turned to the Internet to do research on Fibromyalgia and I found a story of a women who had fallen ill after having taken the birth control injections of depo provera. That made a light bulb go off in my head. The doctor who told me he believed I was suffering from Fibromyalgia said: "Shelly you've been coming in her since Jan. 1997 with these exact same symptoms.. Did you have a car accident or a fall, blow to the head, anything around that time." I told him "No". But then it hit me. I had started the injections of birth control around that time. I found out when my first shot was by calling the doctors office who had given them to me years earlier. My first shot was in Nov. of 1996. By January of 1997 I was already at my third doctor with complaints of migraines, pain at the base of my skull and muscle pain and tightness. All three doctors told me it could not be the shots making me sick so I never thought of it again. I should have trusted my instincts.. But hindsight is 20/20.I put my story online 
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