Philadelphia

“Just imagine waking up every single day with flu-like symptoms, and your entire body aching.”

Miriam suffers from fibromyalgia, an obscur and chronic disorder of widespread muscle pain, fatigue and multiple tender points. She is almost 20 years old. Sabina and I first met Miriam nearby the City Hall Tower.

It was broiling under the cobalt blue sky, but she stopped nonetheless for the “50 people 1 question.”

And then she told us about Fibromyalgia. And how far she’s come along.

Back in the day, she would go weeks enduring chronic pain and sometimes crippling fatigue, unable to do physical labor. That’s what Fibromyalgia does to the body: it forces it to surrender.

The pain and the exhaustion would be such that she sometimes found herself home, unable to go out .

It was the type of suffering that honors no season and respects no calandar.

The type no one would want anybody else to know about (even in this “age of no privacy”). She had minimal social interaction.

Until the Net came along.

Today, a junior in college, Miriam still experiences the recurring pain ; but she counters it with everything she has, mainly escaping into technology and a three-dimensional online world called vSide.

In fact, the virtual life she is living gives her some the things she is not able to do when she feels ill: the picayune pleasures of life, the shopping, clubbing and hanging out with friends.

Her story is the story of people coming together in cyberspace, of online communities helping people to regain a sense of belonging to something somewhere. It’s also the story of technology and the herculean power it wields.

As part of Fybromyalgia Awareness Month, Miriam talked to us about telling her story; she wants to explain how technology has affected her life.

She will be featured in an upcoming multimedia piece. Until then you can learn about her and the illness she lives with on her Website:

http://www.howfibroaffectsme.9k.com

Until next time,

Adeniyi