Hi LouEm, and welcome to the forum.
It sounds to me as if there is no certainty that you have Fibromyalgia, and I want to caution you against jumping to that conclusion prematurely. If in fact you have long covid, that can explain your worsening symptoms and it will eventually fade or even go completely away.
Now, the long term pain is another thing, but if it has been specific areas that again throws the fibro question into the realm of possibility rather than certainty. Fibromyalgia is characterized by widespread and bilateral pain, so if your pain has typically been only your legs or only neck and lower back, for instance, that is not commonly indicative of fibro. Do you know a cause for the long term pain you have had? Accident? Anomaly in some area of your body? Illness? It would be helpful to know these things.
Now, I am not saying you don't have fibro, maybe you do. I am suggesting, however, that if you have absolutely no idea why you have had pain in certain areas of your body for 25 years, you need to see doctor(s) to attempt to diagnose the reasons. If you have some idea (like, it started after that car wreck), then you need to look into why it has gone on so long. Often fibro is diagnosed only after all of the other many things, incidents, syndromes and diseases that cause chronic pain have been eliminated for an individual, because it is not called fibro unless there is no cause for the pain that can be found medically.
All the above is just suggestions on what steps might be wise to take now.
for advice on how to manage things today and in the future, I recommend this post:
I am not a doctor or anything, just a person who has lived with fibromyalgia for several years now and has done a lot of research and trial and error experimentation. What follows is just basics. There are a lot of variations. You will find your own versions of everything I say, as this is not a...
www.fibromyalgiaforums.org
Best of luck and I hope this forum will be helpful to you. That's what we are here to do.
