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If you have fibromyalgia and your spoons are gone by 10 AM on a regular weekday, there is one question my new specialist asked me about that 10 AM crash that no rheumatologist had asked me in 7 years. ☝☝☝ It turned out the 10 AM crash had nothing to do with the morning routine. And every rheumatologist I had seen for 7 years had been wrong about where the spoons were going... I had been sitting at the kitchen table at 7:47 AM last Wednesday with my coffee that had taken 8 minutes to make instead of 3. The school bus was due at 8:14. I had laid my 9-year-old's clothes out the night before. I had packed her lunch the night before. I had set the coffee maker the night before. I had still not had enough. At 7:52 AM she walked down the stairs in the clothes I had laid out and asked me if I was driving her or if her dad was. By 7:58 AM I had texted her dad and told him I was sorry. I am 37. Minneapolis. Mom of one 9-year-old. Married 12 years. Diagnosed with fibromyalgia at 30. Diagnosed with Long COVID at 34 after an infection in October 2021. The two together had made the morning the worst part of the day by a margin nobody who had not lived inside it could understand. For the first 4 years after my fibro diagnosis I could pack my own lunch in the morning and walk the dog before work. Then in October 2021 I caught the virus that ended that. By the spring of 2022 I was banking spoons by going to bed at 9 PM. By the fall of 2022 I was setting the coffee maker the night before. By the winter of 2023 I was laying her clothes out the night before. By the spring of last year I was waking up at 5:30 AM to bank more, until 5:30 became the new 7:47 and the spoons were gone before the alarm rang. I had cancelled my own daughter's field trip chaperone slot 4 times in 6 months. I had stopped going to the PTA meetings. I had told my best friend I would meet her at her son's birthday party instead of going to the morning setup. My husband had been driving our daughter to school 3 mornings out of 5 for the last 4 months. He had stopped asking if I was going to do it. He had been reading to her at bedtime alone for the last 14 months. He had stopped asking me to come up. My rheumatologist for the last 7 years had cycled me through Lyrica that put 29 pounds on me in 7 months while my primary care doctor told me at the next visit to lose weight. Then Cymbalta that killed my sex drive and gave me 3 weeks of brain zaps every time I tried to taper. Then gabapentin that made my legs feel like cement. Then LDN for the Long COVID overlap, which had done nothing for the fatigue. Plus IV vitamin drips at $180 a session 22 times, a $1,200 Whoop band, a Garmin Vivosmart, and 11 books about pacing. About $8,600 out of pocket over 7 years. Last Tuesday at 4:14 PM I went back to my rheumatologist to talk specifically about the bus stop. Not the all-day pain. Not the joints. The bus stop. The 4 months. The chaperone slots I had cancelled. The way my 9-year-old had stopped asking me to walk her to the bus and had started asking me which parent was driving her. He let me finish. He set down his pen. He looked at me. And then he said: "That is standard fibromyalgia and post-COVID fatigue. You will need to get better at pacing. Most patients in your stage are best served by reading about spoon theory and using a paper planner to budget the day in 30-minute blocks." I just stared at him. I shook his hand. I took the printout he handed me about pacing. I walked out. And I sat in the parking lot for 18 minutes with my hands in my lap and the engine off before I could put the key in the ignition. The next morning the pharmacist at the CVS by my rheumatologist's office asked me, while he was counting the gabapentin into the bottle, whether anyone had ever tested my serotonin overnight. He had been a pharmacist for 28 years and had spent the last 5 of them studying functional medicine on the side. He gave me the name of a doctor he had been sending people like me to for the last 2 years. Her name was Dr. Patel, and she had me in her office 6 days later. Dr. Patel set down her pen. She looked at me. Then she looked at the chart in her lap. Then she asked one question. "When does the fatigue peak in your day?" I said morning. Always morning. By four I am functional. By eight I am almost a person again. She nodded once. "Almost a person." She wrote that down. "What does the 10 AM crash actually feel like?" I said it like I had been holding the sentence in my mouth for years. "Like every spoon I had banked from the night before had been spent before the alarm rang. And then the dread, because I knew I was about to text my husband to drive her in again." She kept nodding. "And has anyone ever asked you which mineral the pain filter cannot rebuild without?" I shook my head. Nobody had. "And one more question. Did your symptoms start getting worse in the last 36 to 42 months?" I told her yes, and I told her about the virus in October 2021 and the spoons gone by 10 AM and the field trip chaperone slots and the 9-year-old who had stopped asking me to walk her to the bus. She did not say anything for almost a full minute. Then she said: not one doctor in 7 years has asked you any of those questions. I shook my head. She said: I want to tell you something nobody has told you in 7 years. "Your body has a pain filter. It is run by serotonin. In fibromyalgia patients the filter has always been a little thin, which is why you feel things louder. And the morning crash you are describing is what happens when that filter has been depleting faster than your body can rebuild it. Yours has been depleting since the virus and nobody has been looking at it that way." I had never heard those words in the same sentence before. "During the day the filter is doing its job. At night, while you sleep, serotonin drains. In fibromyalgia patients with a post-viral overlap, faster and lower than normal. By the time you wake up, the filter is empty. Then cortisol spikes on top of it. That is the double hit. That is why the spoons are gone by 10 AM but by noon you feel almost normal. The filter has been collapsed for 6 hours by the time you wake up, and your body is at its lowest point." Like she said, imagine your pain filter is a coffee filter. When it is full of what it needs, it holds. When it is empty, every fatigue signal and every pain signal travels at full strength through your nervous system. The spoons do not get drained. The filter that lets you hold them is empty. The bus stop was not the problem. The pacing was not the problem. The filter was empty. So I asked her, "Why didn't any rheumatologist mention this in 7 years?" And she said because they are trained to manage the pain and fatigue at the surface, not rebuild the filter underneath them. Like she told me the whole fibromyalgia and Long COVID treatment market is built on dampening the signal, not refilling the chemical that filters the signal. If they refilled the filter, you would stop refilling the prescriptions. She gave me the list. Magnesium glycinate first. Then L-theanine, 5-HTP, valerian root, passionflower. She circled the magnesium glycinate twice and said this one was the spine. The mineral the filter cannot rebuild without. She said one more thing about it. About half her patients walked in saying magnesium had not worked for them. It was almost always because most brands sold magnesium oxide or magnesium citrate instead of glycinate, or underdosed the glycinate they did sell. The form mattered. The dose mattered. The filter could not rebuild on the wrong one of either. I went home and ordered all 5 from 5 different brands. 11 pills next to my morning coffee. About $74 a month. So the first week I noticed I had been able to make coffee in 5 minutes instead of 8. Not huge, but something had shifted. Maybe placebo? I don't know. But week two I packed my daughter's lunch the morning of Tuesday instead of the night before. I was at the kitchen table at 7:47 AM and I had not had to text my husband. Like I stared at the lunch bag in my hand thinking I had picked it up out of habit from the fridge. And I thought I was seeing things because I had not packed a morning lunch in 18 months. So I packed it the next morning too. And the morning after that. And that Saturday night my husband reached for my hand on the couch and asked if I wanted to come up and read to our daughter before bed. He had stopped asking me 14 months ago. He had not said it that way. He had just started reading to her alone every night. But I kept waiting for it to stop working like everything else had. Like I had tried enough fibromyalgia protocols to know week three is when they fail. But week four came and I walked my 9-year-old to the school bus stop at 8:14 on a Wednesday morning. I had not done it in 4 months. My husband was upstairs asleep. My daughter said it at the bus stop. "Mommy, you walked me to the bus today." She said it like she had been waiting to say it. I missed a Tuesday in November, and Wednesday too. By Thursday morning the spoons were gone again by 10 AM. Not as bad as before, but back. I took the pills Thursday morning and by Saturday the mornings had eased again. The ingredients worked. The problem was getting them into me every day. A few weeks later I saw a post in an online fibro group about a single jar of gummies with the same 5 ingredients. The jar is called LyraSleep Deep Restore. I read the label. Same 5 ingredients, same forms, same doses, with the magnesium glycinate and the valerian slightly higher than what I had been taking. Melatonin-free, which mattered, because melatonin had always made my fibro mornings worse. I almost did not order it. The thought of one more jar joining the 5 already on my counter made me sick. But they had a 60-day money-back thing, and I figured worst case I sent it back. Dr. Patel had said the pain filter takes about a month to drain. She had been pretty specific about the timeline. So 60 days was enough room to know if anything was happening. I switched. It has been 11 weeks. I have not refilled the gabapentin in 7 weeks. I have walked my 9-year-old to the school bus stop 41 of the last 47 weekday mornings. I have not bought another mattress or another sleep tracker since the switch. Last Saturday morning my husband's alarm went off at 7:42 and I was already at the kitchen table at 7:14 with my coffee made in 4 minutes and my daughter's lunch packed and ready to go. He came downstairs and reached for my hand on the kitchen counter. He had been driving her in 3 mornings out of 5 for 4 months. He did not say anything. He just kept his hand on mine while the kettle boiled. A note. If you are on an antidepressant your doctor prescribed for the fibromyalgia fatigue or pain, talk to your pharmacist before adding this. The 5-HTP in the jar can interact with SSRIs. If your spoons have been gone by 10 AM on a regular weekday for years. If your school-age kid has stopped asking you to walk her to the bus and started asking you which parent is driving her. If you have cancelled your own daughter's field trip chaperone slot 4 times in 6 months. Please read what Dr. Patel told me about the pain filter and the morning. It cost me $8,600 and 7 years of being treated by a rheumatologist who told me to get better at pacing to find this out. You do not have to. The Whoop band I bought for $1,200 is in the bottom of my kitchen junk drawer. I have not charged it in 11 weeks. 📢EDIT: Getting a lot of DMs asking where to find it. It's called LyraSleep Deep Restore. Here's their link: lyrasleep.com/products/deep-restore, or you can just tap the link below this post P.S. The form of magnesium matters. Most brands sell oxide or citrate. The filter cannot rebuild on either one. P.P.S. The pain filter is built from a mineral your body cannot make on its own. If you do not eat it, it does not exist. And nobody on the medical side will tell you which form to buy.