The Incredible Story of How I Defeated Chronic Pain – You Won’t Believe What Finally Worked!

The textbook diagnosis for chronic or persistent pain is “lasting more than 12 weeks despite medication or treatment.” It has been my companion for the past three years, along with a plethora of painkillers and a plethora of doctors. Prolonged pain becomes both a physical and mental battle. It exhausts you and makes you angry, clouds your brain, robs you of your sense of humor, scares you, and robs you of a normal life.

I have always been hypermobile. Great when I was young and could exercise regularly and bend inside out. Even less so at 60, when what allowed me so much freedom of movement began to punish me. In recent years I have suffered from back, neck and arthritic joint problems in my hands.

In the early stages, the pain It was occasional and I could get by. A doctor looked at my hands and told me he had postmenopausal osteoarthritis (so many unappealing words, all in one sentence). A pair of black compression gloves became a must-have accessory. Then, about five years ago, I walked out of the bathroom, and when my foot hit the floor, I felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my groin. It was fleeting, but soon it happened all the time. I started having trouble doing things like getting up from a sitting position or getting into bed.

Just under 28 million adults in the UK suffer from chronic pain. I became one of them. It was the little things that bothered me the most: struggling to walk to my favorite swimming cove in Cornwall, or the night I tried to dance at a friend’s birthday and found myself crying in pain.

I called one doctor, then another, then another. He had an almost childlike trust in them. But after two years of no improvement and no diagnosis, I lost faith, especially in those who said, “We’ll get to the bottom of this!” and then he didn’t. Most offered me some kind of painkiller, a gift to pharmaceutical companies, who are certainly in no hurry to make the pain go away.

My story, like so many others in my situation, was, as my neighbor Tim (an orthopedic surgeon) said, “complex.” The doctors continued to speculate. Maybe it was a groin hernia? Maybe it was an internal problem in my uterus? It was neither of the two things.

I called one doctor, then another, then another. He had an almost childlike trust in them.

A consultation and pelvic MRI at an orthopedic clinic revealed that she had severe degenerative tendinopathy in her pelvis and that the best course of action was cortisone injections. They told me they had a 98 percent success rate and that, with exercise, they should fix things. Two days after the injections, it became clear that I had a two percent failure rate. I had sciatica in my right leg and my walking was reduced to shuffling. The pain was at least 50 percent worse. I left messages at the clinic; How could this happen? No response.

I wasn’t suffering from anything that was life-threatening. (I live with someone who has cancer, although it is manageable with medication and he is not in any tangible pain.) But my pain was physical and strong. He was aware of the amount of painkillers he inhaled; I was never short of a large amount of co-codamol.

Neurologist and neuroscientist Dr. Ash Ranpura says chronic pain is “the kind of pain that doctors hate because they don’t like to prescribe a lot of pharmaceuticals. But they don’t know what else to do and pharmaceutical-based healthcare is not associated, as it should be, with alternative treatments such as acupuncture, cranial osteopathy or Pilates.” Ranpura explains that “chronic pain is not a mechanical disorder. “It is an imbalance in the way the nervous system regulates itself.” To explain how chronic pain reaches the brain, he says: “Imagine a field where the grass is the same length. If you cut a strip, people would start walking along it and it would be used a lot. This is what happens with severe pain: a pathway is formed that the brain can use more and more.”

He continues: “While allopathic medicine is excellent for addressing the initial cause of an imbalance, the holistic approach can restore balance. With therapeutic touch, the brain changes its activation. You have to close the door that leads to pain and open to the feeling of healing.” All of these techniques help to “ground” the body.

My primary care physician, Dr. Carolyn Barshall, says she often suggests acupuncture for chronic pain and has been interested in complementary therapies for a long time. “Some orthopedic doctors only examine the joint in question and tend not to pay attention to the emotional or psychological impact,” she says. In addition to a prescription, “ideally, the patient needs more guidance; In Chinese or holistic practice the whole body is looked at. I think it’s something that [western doctors] “We have to think more.”

As my situation became more desperate, I decided to take more responsibility for my own situation. First, I did everything I could to reduce the inflammation in my tendons. I started intermittent fasting. I took turmeric. I spent 10 days in Buchinger Wilhelmi clinic in Germany, which was the push I needed to take more control mentally and physically. I walked, I stretched, I fasted and I meditated. When I left, I was still in pain, but I was on a different path.

At home, I replaced pain relievers with Dreem Distillery CBD Drops before going to sleep, which relaxed me. listen Jon Kabat-Zinn Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief and used classic deep yoga and regulated breathing (Pranayama) techniques to calm myself during pain-related insomnia. I looked into “somatic” therapies (created by Thomas Hanna in the 1970s), a way to use body movement as a means to improve physical and mental health. I began working intensively with a Pilates teacher, Polly Benge, and chiropractor Steve Hughes, who work at The octagon clinic in Hammersmith, west London. Benge, a former dancer, teaches mindful exercises with attention to breathing, alignment and control. She would put her hands on me as she guided me through the limited things she could do and handed me a tissue when she cried in frustration over the things she couldn’t do.

Little by little I have found my way back to myself.

They worked on “everything” on me like I was an old car that needed restoration. Hughes assured me that he was actually suffering from chronic pain, because at times it seemed so unreal that it was hard not to wonder if he was making it all up. He spent months trying to free my frozen pelvis and relieve the related pain in my back and neck. At the end of a session, he would hug me. One night, Benge texted me: “We’ve got your back, literally.” I felt supported. Now I can see that what they were doing was helping me work on both my mental and physical health. For them and for me it is clear that the two are one.

Finally, another doctor, this time a rheumatology specialist, wearing the requisite pinstripe suit in an overheated office on Harley Street, looked at me and said, “Well, of course you have arthritis in your hips!” An x-ray later confirmed it. “Wow!” said Tim the neighbor when I showed him the scan. “You have really horrible hips.”

It’s been five months since I had a bilateral hip replacement. (My orthopedic surgeon took one look at the x-ray of the “shitty hips” and told me in no uncertain terms that they both needed to come out.) I was very strong before the operation, I worked with weights so that my upper body could support it. the crutches I was forced to use. Little by little I have found my way back to myself.

I still have pain, but they are secondary things: the ligaments are still tender, my pelvis is trying to return to its normal position after having twisted to compensate for my hips. But I take anti-inflammatory pills as little as possible and visit my chiropractor regularly; he told me I get a gold star for a good recovery. I still do Pilates and exercise, I have acupuncture and I can go for walks. These are all things that seem normal, but to me they have been far from normal for the past few years. None of this has been cheap. I pay £80 for a Pilates session and £65 for cranial osteopathy. It has been worth every penny as I slowly rejoin the real world.

Chronic pain is exhausting, destabilizing and debilitating. But now I have a relationship with it, I understand it and I try to help it. I also know how to change the channel in my brain from fear to control. There is a lot we can do to help us change the narrative of pain, small economic things (breathing, meditation, visualization) that float, like the pain itself, between the mental and the physical. I feel for the first time in over three years that I can see a possible ending. But I’ve learned a lot about myself and my own strength along the way.

I recently went to a wedding and while enjoying the music under the trees, I realized I was dancing, something I hadn’t been able to do in years. Once again I cried on the dance floor, but this time I had a smile on my face.