Lesson 1: It’s Ok If They Don’t Believe You.
After my injury, for some reason the doctors acted like I was making up the pain I felt. As if I had spent all that time and hard work to get my degree just to let my career go down the drain by faking pain. Like so many others, I wasn’t.
It is so very frustrating when you have an injury or disease that is not visible! Just because you can’t see muscular damage or nerve damage, it does not mean it is not there! I got shuffled back and forth to probably about ten different doctors before I finally found one that not only believed that I had pain but actually understood and was able to tell me what was causing it.
Back then chronic pain syndromes were just being discovered. Fortunately, the chronic pain specialist I found knew about them and was willing to try some pretty aggressive techniques to help me battle mine.
At that point in time I was already on multiple prescription meds and not just suffering from the injury itself but from depression, stress, insomnia and weakness. These are all common when you suffer from chronic pain.
The original damage in the muscle had healed over but left massive quantities of scar tissue in its place. I had two years that I was taken off work and put in to physical therapy, every day and for weeks it was eight hours a day. Later on we ‘washed, rinsed and repeated’ on this!
I literally had tried every avenue of treatment I could think of. I was a mess! I only wanted someone to tell me what was wrong, why I was hurting so badly!
At first, I was not overly fond of this new doctor I had found. I weighed 150 pounds when I went for my first visit and he called me “mildly obese” on my report! Now, we can add “offended” to my diagnosis list (I smile)! Anyway, I told him that I needed to find a way to treat this and could still manage to work! All the medications were causing me to be tired, all the time, and no one wants a nurse that isn’t on top of her game.
He took up the challenge as no other Doctor would. We spent the next ten years exploring options. He started immediately to give me trigger point injections that were fan tailed, meaning he would go in the muscle with the needle then staying under the skin inject in three different sites for every shot, so when I say 30 injections for 90 sites you understand that I was a walking pin cushion for years! But, it did numb my back enough that I could survive and even work without the need of pain meds. This man never gave up on me. We spent our appointment time talking about pain and exploring new ways to manipulate the muscles and scar tissue. He taught me new ways to look at pain and ways to stretch the muscles and scar tissue without destroying it or doing more damage. He taught me how to use ice, and heat and other ‘modalities’ to compensate when I could not take the pain, but also could not take the meds. “Modalities” is just a fancy word to say some form of treatment that is physical rather than medicinal.
Then when the shots wore off and we were still weeks away from the shots we would break down and he would give me the meds I would need to hold on. Above all this, the most important thing he taught me, was to never give up on me, and to find ways to learn to live with my condition. I didn’t understand what he meant at first, but eventually caught on to the fact that chronic pain meant forever, I had to learn how to cope with that fact and still figure out a way to enjoy life and be the best I could be at anything I chose to do.
Lesson Learned: It’s OK if a Doctor does not believe me. I will just move on, until I find one that does. If I can’t find one that does, then I will take up the mantle myself to treat my condition in a way that I will be able to continue in a productive life.
After my injury, for some reason the doctors acted like I was making up the pain I felt. As if I had spent all that time and hard work to get my degree just to let my career go down the drain by faking pain. Like so many others, I wasn’t.
It is so very frustrating when you have an injury or disease that is not visible! Just because you can’t see muscular damage or nerve damage, it does not mean it is not there! I got shuffled back and forth to probably about ten different doctors before I finally found one that not only believed that I had pain but actually understood and was able to tell me what was causing it.
Back then chronic pain syndromes were just being discovered. Fortunately, the chronic pain specialist I found knew about them and was willing to try some pretty aggressive techniques to help me battle mine.
At that point in time I was already on multiple prescription meds and not just suffering from the injury itself but from depression, stress, insomnia and weakness. These are all common when you suffer from chronic pain.
The original damage in the muscle had healed over but left massive quantities of scar tissue in its place. I had two years that I was taken off work and put in to physical therapy, every day and for weeks it was eight hours a day. Later on we ‘washed, rinsed and repeated’ on this!
I literally had tried every avenue of treatment I could think of. I was a mess! I only wanted someone to tell me what was wrong, why I was hurting so badly!
At first, I was not overly fond of this new doctor I had found. I weighed 150 pounds when I went for my first visit and he called me “mildly obese” on my report! Now, we can add “offended” to my diagnosis list (I smile)! Anyway, I told him that I needed to find a way to treat this and could still manage to work! All the medications were causing me to be tired, all the time, and no one wants a nurse that isn’t on top of her game.
He took up the challenge as no other Doctor would. We spent the next ten years exploring options. He started immediately to give me trigger point injections that were fan tailed, meaning he would go in the muscle with the needle then staying under the skin inject in three different sites for every shot, so when I say 30 injections for 90 sites you understand that I was a walking pin cushion for years! But, it did numb my back enough that I could survive and even work without the need of pain meds. This man never gave up on me. We spent our appointment time talking about pain and exploring new ways to manipulate the muscles and scar tissue. He taught me new ways to look at pain and ways to stretch the muscles and scar tissue without destroying it or doing more damage. He taught me how to use ice, and heat and other ‘modalities’ to compensate when I could not take the pain, but also could not take the meds. “Modalities” is just a fancy word to say some form of treatment that is physical rather than medicinal.
Then when the shots wore off and we were still weeks away from the shots we would break down and he would give me the meds I would need to hold on. Above all this, the most important thing he taught me, was to never give up on me, and to find ways to learn to live with my condition. I didn’t understand what he meant at first, but eventually caught on to the fact that chronic pain meant forever, I had to learn how to cope with that fact and still figure out a way to enjoy life and be the best I could be at anything I chose to do.
Lesson Learned: It’s OK if a Doctor does not believe me. I will just move on, until I find one that does. If I can’t find one that does, then I will take up the mantle myself to treat my condition in a way that I will be able to continue in a productive life.