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A woman on the go, the Scarborough resident was living well, enjoying her life and fulfilling job as an administrative assistant. Suddenly, after one stressful summer at work, everything changed.

"I would come home from work and I would be exhausted and I would just want to lie on the bed," she said. "Gradually, over a month period, simple tasks that I used to perform like photocopying or typing a letter became overwhelming."

Soon after, she started to have chronic pain in her shoulder and then the muscles from her neck all the way down to her shoulder blades became stiff.

"I went to massage therapy three times a week, but it didn't help because he would clear all the knots and an hour later they would come right back," she said.

Within two months she was unable to work as she was mentally and physically exhausted.

Six months later, Adeken was diagnosed with fibromyalgia.

"You can't give a diagnosis of fibromyalgia right away, you have to make sure the symptoms are ongoing, and he tested me on the trigger points and I had all of them," Adeken said.

There are 18 trigger points, or sensitive areas on the body, including places on the neck, shoulders, elbows, back, hips and knees. Adeken said a rheumatologist applies pressure to those areas to see how sensitive the area is, or how severe the pain. If a patient has 11 trigger points, in addition to some of the other symptoms, fibromyalgia is diagnosed.

That was 13 years ago and today, Adeken is still suffering from its effects.

Fibromyalgia is described as a chronic disorder that causes widespread musculoskeletal pain, fatigue and multiple tender points with pain that can range from mild to intense. It also can cause sleep disturbances, dry eyes, stiffness, irritable bowel syndrome, anxiety and depression.

Iris Weverman is a registered physiotherapist who owns and operates Iris Weverman Physiotherapy, a clinic in Toronto where she treats patients with fibromyalgia.

She said the disorder is more mainstream now, and more accepted than 10 years ago when people had doubts it even existed.

"A lot of people thought it was just in the head because there's no (specific) test for it," she said.

Weverman said with fibromyalgia, you have to figure out if it's a primary diagnosis -- for example, someone's got it after the stress and injury of a car accident -- or if it's secondary, such as someone with cancer developing fibromyalgia symptoms.

"Or they can just get it out of the blue," she said. "Anything that thwarts the auto-immune system, like stress ... so when the autoimmune system gets down, some people get rheumatoid arthritis, some people get fibromyalgia."

While Adeken had all of the symptoms of fibromyalgia, her insurance company told her it was all in her head.

"That was really stressful dealing with the disability insurance. It was so stressful that I had to let it go," she said.

Luckily, her husband, Andrew, was supportive. Other members of her family were not.

"When everybody else was telling me, 'You're lazy, it's all in your head.' He was telling me 'No, I know you and it's not in your head'," she said.

The disorder also affected her kids because she couldn't do things with them the way she used to.

"Family time had to be cut back hugely because I didn't have the energy to do anything," she said.

Adeken said she could not concentrate, had to give up driving and reading, one of her favourite pastimes. She describes it like her mind being in a haze.

"It affects you cognitively because you are so tired you can't really think, and you're just trying to survive, but at the same time I was a mom," she said.

After doing her own research on fibromyalgia and chronic pain, Adeken said she thought she could beat her symptoms over time and relaxation.

"But before that there was a lot of denial, a lot if it, many, many years worth of denial," she said.

She attributes her survival to looking inward.

"I had to become self-aware to survive now because the old way that I survived would not work, I had to find a new way of surviving," she said.