There are many problems with having a chronic pain condition. The first one is that it’s hard to differentiate between regular pain and fibro pain. The second is that usual guidelines for things like recovery times are not written with you in mind.

On January 24 I had my first ever surgery to remove all four of my wisdom teeth. I was finally in a place where I could afford to see the dentist, and had known my wisdom teeth needed to come out for a while. I sought out a practice that was done for valuing patient comfort, and even though I was told my surgery would not be straightforward given the growth and position of my wisdom teeth, the dentist assured me that he was absolutely confident he could get it done and everything would be fine.

They told me patients usually can get back to work after three days, and let me tell you right now that if you have fibromyalgia, “usually” doesn’t apply to you. After a year of living with this diagnosis I was pretty confident that I would need more than just three days to recover. I talked to my doctor who confirmed that I should count on at least a week.

It was frustrating to have to try and plan my busy grad school life around a one week recovery, and I could only manage four days and then a day of working from home. What was more frustrating, though, were the myriad well-intentioned people who assured me that I would be back to normal within a few days. Drawing upon their own experiences, they knew that they hadn’t been out of commission for that long, so I shouldn’t be either. It was meant to be reassuring but it also made me angry. Assuming that my disabled body reacts the same way as your abled body just ends up putting a lot of pressure on me . Will you think I’m lazy, lying or not trying hard enough if I end up needing more time to recover?

The week following my surgery was very uncomfortable, sometimes spiking up into the agonizing… and I could not tell whether that was normal or not. Were people who had four teeth cut out of their gums (including sutures) supposed to be in this kind of pain, or was this fibromyalgia making the pain worse, or was the pain a symptom of something going terribly wrong? Did I have a dry socket necessitating a trip to the dentist for relief, or was this normal remodeling of the mouth, or was it just my body going haywire at the trauma and sending me into a severe flare?

It turned out that my healing was spectacular, to the point where the dentist appeared a little impressed at how good the incision sites looked. I told him I had been “in some bad pain” for a few days and he gently dismissed it as normal since the mouth was recovering. I don’t think he quite understood the kind of pain I was talking about, and I didn’t really see the point in explaining.

It has been 11 days since the surgery and I am still recovering. As I predicted, I did end up flaring on the Tuesday following the surgery, and still had to power through it to get myself to work on Wednesday and Thursday (Friday was a work from home day, thankfully). I am recovering from both the surgery, since my lower jaw and teeth still hurt from time to time, as well as a flare, and because I took some time off for the surgery I have work to catch up on.

The bottom line is this: if you have fibromyalgia, any kind of trauma to your body (and surgery IS a trauma) is going to be harder on you than on abled-bodied persons. You probably won’t have the luxury to take off all the time that you need. It is going to suck. Plan accordingly.