This afternoon’s thought:  I’ve been thinking in terms of how all the different imbalances and symptoms of fibromyalgia might relate to thyroid.  In other words, think of the universe.  Thyroid is the sun and everything else relates to it, revolves around it, depends on it.  What if it’s more like a chain reaction?  You have the first explosion, which causes the next, and then the next and the next, etc etc etc.  For the sake of argument, a thyroid malfunction of some sort is the first explosion, which then causes another dysfunction somewhere, and on and on.  Thyroid is really only related to that second explosion.  The second explosion is really only related to the third, the third to the fourth…

This actually presents a bit more of a complex puzzle and could explain why there are so many different variants between how people experience fibromyalgia.  Looking at how everything relates to each other, it’s possible to have a myriad of different “pairs” of problems, like dominoes.  They can go end-to-end in many different combinations.  There isn’t just one way to do it or the whole thing falls apart.

Or… it could be one of those brain teasers you pick up in the store, look at, put down, and walk away, deciding you don’t need a puzzle to point out how stupid you may be.  Maybe the pieces do have to be paired perfectly and in the perfect order to be able to trace back to the first firecracker that started the chain reaction.

No matter what type of puzzle it is, the goal to me would be to find that first firecracker or the first match that’s struck and stop it from striking.  Yeah, I don’t know how to do that.  All I know is when I solve a puzzle, I have to look at all the pieces, scatter them around, sort them by color and type, and then look for the similarities and the differences.  I have to look for the pieces that actually were in the box by accident and get rid of them.  There are a lot of extra, very distracting pieces in the fibromyalgia puzzle, and it’s possible I’m just holding a plastic bag with pieces from four different puzzles all mixed together.  Time to empty the bag on the floor.