This was going to be my third post but then what happened at the gym happened so it’s my fourth. Better late than never, right? 😁
There are three things that you have to understand before you read on.
First, this is my story. It may or may not resonate with you. Pretty much
everyone’s experience with fibromyalgia (affectionately called fibro from now
on) is different; so my experience may not be anywhere close to yours. You'll see later on in this post that my experience was so different to what I was reading about fibro online that I didn't believe this is what I had.
Second, following from what I’ve said about everyone’s experience with
fibro being different and as you’ll see from this story and from subsequent
posts, I’m sure, my fibro is sneaky. It generally waits for me to do something
to myself – stub my toe or hold something wrong or push myself just a little
too hard at the gym – for it to take that as an opportunity to send pain to that
area. Almost as if it needs to justify its existence in my life.
Third, this isn’t a short or linear story. How appropriate considering
that the recovery journey is neither, either!
For your reading pleasure, I’m interspersing my story with pictures from the few days I spent in Mauritius (I traveled a heck of a lot for work and I got to be in some beautiful places – as well as some not so beautiful ones – and, as you’ll see in future posts, this could have contributed to my fibro) because if I needed to take breaks from my story, I can imagine that you’ll need breaks, too 😅
So here goes …
Although I’d never been excessively active, indoors or outdoors, nor
eaten the healthiest of diets I was in pretty good shape and good health up until
my mid-thirties. I mean, I worked out a few times a week and would try whatever
came up whenever it came up from paintballing to hiking to skydiving to
crossfit and I’d get dressed up and go out with my friends and dance all night
on the weekends. I’d eat sensibly during the week – cereal and low-fat milk, lean
protein, salads, sometimes sandwiches and pasta – pizza and burgers on the
weekends. My body just functioned the way a healthy body should and I never
thought about it.
Then, in late 2013, when I was 34, a few things started going wrong very
slowly and very gradually.
I remember lying in bed one night, it must have been October or November,
after an excessively hectic day at work (not the first I’d ever had in my life)
speaking with a friend on the phone and, it was the weirdest thing ever!, I
could hear my ears ringing – you know that ringing in your ears after you’ve been to
a particularly loud concert or nightclub? Or the ringing they put on the
soundtrack of a movie after an explosion so the audience understands that this
is what the characters are hearing post-explosion? That ringing.
So I hear this ringing while my friend is speaking and I’m thinking “Wow,
I had no idea this could happen just by being on the phone all day dealing with
stuff.” I wasn’t worried or scared because I’d had my ears ring after a night
out or a concert so I figured it’d go away as it usually did. The ringing was
still around when I woke up which, again, didn’t worry me because that’s
happened before, as well.
But when I went into the office I found I couldn’t actually hear my
colleagues speaking with me very well because the ringing was so loud! The
ringing never did go away but, after a week or so, I learned to listen through
it or over it or under it ... whatever the right expression is. In fact, I
generally don’t hear it anymore unless I think about it or talk about it (like
now) or when I’m extra stressed and it gets louder (oh yes, it has a volume
knob! More on that in future posts.) or it’s super quiet around me, like at
night when I’m going to sleep.
Those of you who are familiar with the ringing will know that I’d
developed tinnitus which apparently affects one in five people. Some people
have a consistent ringing in one or both ears while for others it comes and
goes at will. Mine’s consistent in both ears and, despite what the internet
says, there’s no cure for the tinnitus like mine that has no physical reason for being.
Also, take it from me, don’t Google the symptoms. Tinnitus is, generally
speaking, an innocuous thing that is more annoying than it is anything else.
So go to your GP or, better yet, an ENT specialist and have them check you out
before you get yourself to believing you’ve got something terminal.
They have a cute way of cutting up baby pineapples on the beach 🍍
Back to the story …
In the summer of 2014 while my sisters and I were on holiday in Lebanon visiting our parents, my nephew was learning to walk and I spent a good two weeks hunched over for hours every day supporting him from under his arms because he refused to hold on to anything to help himself along. He wanted to walk perfectly from the start with ‘no assistance’ (as far as he was concerned) and this was how he was going to do it. He's such a little go-getter 😍
At the end of each day I’d find that it was taking me longer to be able
to stand upright comfortably and by the time I got back to to the country where I live the pain was consistent and, whenever possible, I’d hunch over instead of stand
or sit up straight because that hurt a little less.
Another pause in the story while I mention that I’ve injured my back
quite badly twice in my life so I was used to it hurting: once in gym class
when I was 12 while trying to jump over a hurdle but, instead, I got my foot
stuck in it and crashed down on my coccyx in a perfect sitting position which
caused one of the vertebrae to dislodge slightly, and once in my mid-20’s when
I had a car accident which fractured a vertebra and had me in a back brace for
a few months. Also, I’ve had knee pain my entire life because various tendons
and ligaments are shorter or longer than they should be (birth defect,
apparently) which causes my kneecaps to slide across my femurs and scrape the
cartilage slightly every single time I bend my knees whether it’s to run or sit
or walk up stairs.
Pause over …
So again, I didn’t think much of the back pain when it started. But when,
after a month or so, I was still in pain, I went to my GP who diagnosed a back
spasm and prescribed B vitamins. The knee pain didn’t concern her much and
she reckoned the B vitamins would help that as well. That didn’t work even
a little. I went back a couple more times and nothing changed so I figured my
body was just getting older and needed more time to heal; especially as my GP
wasn’t overly concerned about it. So I just figured this was my new normal and
I tried to get on with life.
A year or so later, I was learning how to ride a motorbike – something
I’d wanted to do since I was a teenager – and I fell off … as you do. My left
foot got stuck in the still rotating rear wheel and I felt my ankle crack in a
way similar to how it feels when you crack your knuckles. I got up, brushed myself
off and because, despite the twist and crack, my ankle wasn’t in any way
painful nor did it swell up, I went on with life. A few days later though, when
the discomfort still hadn’t disappeared, I went to my GP’s clinic and saw her colleague
(my GP wasn’t there) who diagnosed a simple sprain and said it’d heal by
itself.
Nope.
Pause again because this part is important in the grand scheme of things
as you’ll see as I write, and you read, more posts: I wasn’t about to let this
get in my way of getting my license so I’d wrap up my ankle super tight before
putting on my steel-toe hiking boots on which I wore to ride (steel toe boots
were the rule) and I’d wrap up my right wrist before putting on the riding
gloves (I don’t remember when that started hurting) and I’d ignore the pain in
my back and get on that motorcycle. I did get my license but I never rode after
that last road test because the pain had gotten so bad by then that I knew it’d
be impossible to control a bike and with no ‘protection’ in the form of the
instructors on the road with me I wasn’t willing to take the risk of riding. Had
I not passed that day – and I did fail a couple of times before that after
taking about three months to learn when everyone else was ‘graduating’ in a
month – I wouldn’t have ever gotten my license. But I got my license! That, to
me, was all that mattered. I had a goal and I accomplished it and damn the
impact it had on me.
Typical gorgeous view when you're not in the center of Port Louis
By this time, it’s 2016 and the pain in my knees and back, more than
anywhere else, had gotten much worse. Even today, my ankles are uncomfortable
more than painful and there’s a difference between discomfort and pain, my
wrists hurt on and off, and although the pain and discomfort – double whammy –
in my knees comes and goes frequently, it’s the back pain that gets to me more
than anything. I used to be a stomach sleeper but I’ve since learned how to sleep in a fetal position for most of the night and, when the back pain is particularly bad, my knees are right up on my
chest and my back is curved as far as it’ll curve and my arms are tightly together,
elbows to knees – alternating sides during the night – because that’s the only,
and I do mean only, way I can sleep somewhat comfortably. Of course, that means
that my knees end up hurting a bit more and my neck, on the nights when I'm curled up in a ball, has to bend backwards so I don’t suffocate which then causes neck
and shoulder pain. But those hurt less than anything else. Lesser of two evils
and all that. 🤷
I can’t even remember how many times I went to my GP for these aches and
pains nor how many different B vitamins and over-the-counter
anti-inflammatories I was prescribed. Nothing worked, of course.
The back pain in those early days. I pray I never have back pain like that again. It was sometimes so bad that I could barely get out of bed let alone drive to work and function. I remember there were days when a colleague – who is like a sister to me – and I would be going to another emirate for work I’d have to put the chair in the car down so that I could, as much as possible squirm around during the ride to minimize my discomfort. Oh! What she must have thought! 😆😂
I’d also stopped sleeping properly
because after six hours of lying down, the pain would wake me up (I hadn't figured out the fetal sleeping position yet) and I’d have
to find a way to move through the pain to get out of bed. In fact, I still
can’t comfortably lie down for more than six hours in any 24-hour period so.
This need to move after six hours wasn’t so bad during the week because I
could always adapt my sleeping schedule to make sure I’d be awake six hours
later to go to work. But on the weekends when all I wanted was to lie in bed
and catch up on sleep it was torture to have to get up and move to the couch to
try and sleep sitting up for however long the pain would let me.
At some point during all this, my GP did eventually send me to a sports
injury specialist because my pain was mainly in my joints and I was quite a
regular gym-goer. The specialist diagnosed a back spasm, same as my GP, and I
don’t remember what he said about my knees and wrist – it’s all in a file
somewhere. He prescribed physiotherapy and a pill (a controlled combination of carisoprodol
and paracetamol) which he said would get rid of
all the pain within four days. You can guess what happened, I’m sure. And this,
then, caused another problem which would haunt me ever afterward. When I told
him the pill hadn’t worked, his reaction was: “Well if that pill didn’t work,
then I can’t help you.”
And this, dear reader, is basically what every other specialist and GP
and pharmacist would tell me whenever I’d visit them and we’d get to the part
where they ask: “And what medications have you taken to try and solve this
problem?”
There was one pharmacist in Lebanon who, as a last-ditch effort in response to my begging, gave me an over-the-counter
(Neurobion) that helped massively for a couple of hours and
then it didn’t help again ever.
As for the physiotherapy. I’d like to believe that the therapist tried everything he knew
how to try from manual manipulation to kinesiology tape to needling to giving
me exercises to do at home to supplement his efforts. And when I told him
nothing was working his response was, you guessed it: “I don’t know what else
to do. I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”
One thing does make me laugh these days, though, and that’s when he one
day picked up my wrist and closed his eyes and massaged my wrist and said, “yes,
I can feel that some of the bones in your wrist have moved out of place.” Really?
What bones moved? 😂😂😂 I have
fibro. My bones didn’t move. What bones did you feel moved? How desperate was
he to not have all his years of study and practice fail him that he made
himself believe that my bones had moved? Or was he trying to put one over on
me? I’ll never know the answer to that.
A little bit of serenity 🌞
Obviously, I’d stopped going to the gym or even going out at all by this
point. My body just couldn’t handle the moving or standing upright and you can
forget about lifting weights or wearing heels!
But I couldn’t not go to the
gym because somehow, between 2014 and 2016, I had gained 12 kilograms! The
thing is, when I gain weight I gain it all over so I don’t look very different and
most of my clothes fit the same so neither I nor any of my friends or family
had any idea the weight gain was that much. And also, I don’t weigh myself regularly at
all – I learned to stop doing that a loooooooooooong time ago for many reasons.
Over these two years, each time I’d been to see my GP for the aches and
pains she’d look at me and ask if I was gaining weight and I’d say that
according to the scale in her office, it seemed so even though my clothes still
fit fine. Then one day, when I really was not
in a good mood because it’d been almost three years of pain that no one
could help me with and I was gaining weight and my sister’s wedding was coming
up and how was I going to fit into anything and here’s the GP asking if I’ve
gained weight for the millionth time, I said: “Check your chart, why don’t you?
According to your staff, I’ve gained 12 kilos in the last two years.” She
checked and when she realized it was actually 14 kilograms (I’d made my way
slowly up from 58kg to 72kg) she had a bit of panic and ordered blood tests to
check my glucose levels and thyroid. Those came back normal. So her conclusion
was: well, the tests came back normal so there’s nothing I can do for you.
(Where have I heard this line before?)
Pause for something else here which is important in the grand scheme of
things (again, you’ll see this in subsequent posts). This wasn’t the first
time I’d had unexplained weight gain that this GP had tried to diagnose. The
first time it happened she’d ordered a brain MRI because she’d found that my
prolactin levels were off the charts and that could point to a pituitary gland
tumor (which she totally neglected to mention would be benign because such
tumors apparently always are so I spent a lovely few days waiting for results
and not telling anyone in my family but spending time with them just in case this
was goodbye – if they’re reading this post, this is how they’re finding out).
The MRI came back clear, thank God, but she refused to do anything about
it because she wasn’t an expert endocrinologist and, after my refusal to just
go home and live with it, she accepted to refer me to a specialist. Said
specialist also refused to do anything about it because although my prolactin
levels were through the roof, they weren’t high enough in his opinion to warrant
anything. He told me a long-winded story – seriously, one hour and not a minute
less – about how he used to be stressed and eventually quit his job and went on
a cruise at the end of which his suggestion was that I go home and learn how to
lower my stress levels.
Thankfully, when I went to Lebanon on holiday a few weeks later, my
doctor there accepted to prescribe medication to get my prolactin levels back to normal.
So here I am, three years later, in ridiculous pain and gaining weight for no good reason and the medical profession has decided that because the tests have come back normal and because the pills haven’t worked, there’s nothing that can be done and there’s nothing that’s wrong with me and I have to live with it.
Insert appropriate swear words here. Insert some tears as well because God
knows I cried then and am crying now at the memories. Because you see, it wasn’t
just the Western medical profession that couldn’t help me. I’d tried Acupuncture
and Ayurveda for months which, of course, aren’t covered by my insurance. And
they also said the same thing: because nothing they were trying was helping, I
had to go home and learn to live with it. I’ll never forget this one acupuncturist.
He didn’t speak English well at all so he had a translator with him. When I explained
what was wrong, he had me lie down on my stomach and put needles all over my
scalp – previous acupuncturists had put them in my knees and back and shoulders
and wherever else. He then left the room and came back a while later, picked up
my hand and walked out again. A while later, he came back again, picked up my
hand again, and then started taking the needles out. When I sat up he said that
I have cold hands. Yes, I do. Always have. Cold hands and cold feet even in the
hottest summers. This, he said, points to an anomaly in the flow of energy in
my body. However, all his patients who have this anomaly, when he puts the
needles in their scalp as he did for me, find that their hands have warmed up
after twenty minutes. He’d left the needles in me for forty minutes and my
hands were still cold. Can you guess what he said next?
I cried all the way home.
And then, then I got moving. I figured if no one was going to help me, then I’d help my own damn self!
I needed to get moving again!
By now, it had been around about a year, likely just over, since I’d last done
anything physical and my body doesn’t like to sit or be immobile, pain be
damned.
First things first, I pulled out my pair of super sturdy knee braces
which went from around three inches above to three inches below my knee, had a
knee-cap support donut, and metal going down the sides (I’d almost always had
knee pain, remember, so I had quite a few knee supports of varying degrees of
‘seriousness’). I then headed to the mega-pharmacy that stocks everything from
Panadol to wheelchairs and hospital beds for a pair of wrist wraps, an ankle
wrap for my left ankle (eventually I’d have to get a brace with metal down the
sides for the left ankle and I’d use the wrap for my right ankle), and back support.
The biggest problem was my back. None of the weight lifting belts offered
the support I needed for my back when I was doing squats. I actually tried
every weight belt they had in stock and did squats right there to test how much
support I was getting. Honestly, I did. I was, after all, on a mission to get
my life back! Sure, the staff and other customers giggled. So what? I’d like to
see what they’d do in my shoes.
As I was heading away with my ankle and wrist supports trying to figure
out what the heck I was going to do about getting some decent back support I
saw, out of the corner of my eye, a box with a picture of a pregnant lady
wearing a big purple back support. Turns out it’s a maternity belt (I didn’t even
know those things existed). Well, I figure, if it can support a lady’s back
during pregnancy it should be able to support me during squats. So I take it
out of the box, try it on, do a few squats, and it feels great compared to the others.
Mission accomplished! I’m heading out of the mega-pharmacy with an
arsenal of support and no idea
whether it’s going to be enough when put to the test in a body pump class. But
if it isn’t, I’ll figure something else out. For now, this is Plan A.
Step two, I joined a gym again and headed into class, and went to the
very back of the class with my arsenal and super low weights. And then I
proceeded to ‘get dressed’. I won’t lie, I felt about as ridiculous as I
looked. But you know what? I squatted and lunged and lifted and did every
single track with almost no pain – I was uncomfortable but, like I said before,
there’s a difference between discomfort and pain. I couldn’t squat or lunge as
low as I used to because the knee and back braces limited my range of movement
but I didn’t care one bit. I was moving again!
Step two, part two: diet. Not diet as in ‘go on a diet’; diet as in ‘make a lifestyle change diet’. I cut out refined sugar (not that I ate much to begin with but when you’re trying to lose 14 kilos, you tend to make sure you do every little bit you can to help yourself along), substituted brown rice for white, watched my calories, substituted baking and steaming for frying. After a couple of months, I was working out six to seven times a week, doing body pump and an RPM or spin class every day, and suspended yoga – aka aerial yoga – on the weekends. Not bad for someone who had been barely able to stand up straight a year earlier, right? [Side note: regular yoga hurts me – not the good hurt that tells you you’re changing your body, the bad hurt that tells you you’re harming your body – but suspended yoga doesn’t for the most part because the hammock is supporting my body weight and taking the pressure off my joints.]
Don’t be mistaken, I still hurt outside the gym. My back and knees and
ankles and wrists all still hurt. In fact, I’d gone out and bought dozens of
new shoes and sandals because my existing shoe wardrobe didn’t fit my existing
painful life.
And still, I didn’t lose a gram. Nothing. At all. For about a year.
One day I was working in the little conference room in the office when a colleague who’d recently moved over from the UK walked in and we got to talking. She’s wonderfully active and has done a handful of Ironman Triathlons so I figured who better to advise me on my eating and workouts. I will never forget her reaction when I told her how I eat and how I work out and how I’m still not losing weight. Heck! I might even have been gaining weight!
She looked at me with more seriousness than I’d ever been looked at
before – even by my parents when I’m in trouble with them! – and said: “Your
body doesn’t look the way it should. Something’s definitely wrong.” She then
offered to put me in touch with someone she knew from her town in England who
is a psychoneuroimmunologist (takes as long to type as it does to say!) and who
she was sure could help. All she had to do was confirm that he would work with
me remotely.
As soon as she confirmed that he would, I was on the phone to him. And I
will say this until the day I die: this gentleman saved my life.
Pause again for me to mention that while the weight gain issue had been
happening and confusing me and I'd shifted my primary focus to that, the pain was very much still there and I cannot
count how many times I Googled my symptoms. The two results I kept getting were
chondromalacia patella for the pain in my knees and fibromyalgia for the pain
everywhere else. But I just couldn’t have fibro because, except for the
consistent pain, I didn’t have any of the other symptoms: no trouble
concentrating, no general fatigue, no numbness in my extremities, no trouble
sleeping – I could fall asleep in seconds and stay asleep, waking up only
because of the pain – even the pain that was being described in the article
wasn’t what I was feeling at all. So how could it be fibro? Also, I mention the weight gain and what I did with my diet in some detail because it will come back to us in future posts.
And here I really do have to make two statements that I hope you really
pay attention to:
- One, and I’ve
said this before, everyone’s experience with fibro is different. My pain didn’t
fit the symptoms being described online. Yours may or may not. The way my fibro
presents itself to me may or may not be the way yours does (remember, mine
usually waits to have a ‘reason’ and I know of people whose fibro is set off by cold weather). What works for me may or may not work for
you – goodness knows what works for others hasn’t worked for me.
- Two, please please please, if you find
yourself in the situation I’m about to describe, please find someone who specializes in treating fibro and see them
before you go through with whatever plan is being suggested. I will be giving
you a bunch of names* at various points during the course of writing this blog
but if you find that you need to speak with someone sooner than I mention
names, please either contact me or Google ‘functional medical practitioner’ or
‘fibromyalgia specialist’ and find someone near you. Someone who has good
reviews or who you can ask about! (*I don’t know any of these people personally
and I’m not in any way affiliated with them nor do I make any money if you see
them; these are, quite simply, the people I’ve come across and learned from
over the last seven months and whose approaches – both to treatment and to
education about fibro and CFS/ME – I find to be trustworthy.)
One day my colleague (the one I mentioned is very close to me), seeing my
desperation and having watched me struggle for so long, suggested I visit the
surgeon who had operated on her knees years back. Another specialist but what
did I have to lose? So I went and he diagnosed chondromalacia in both my knees
which would require keyhole surgery. I forget what he said about my back and
wrist (again, in a file somewhere) but he injected something into my wrist – it
didn’t do anything at all for the pain, of course – and requested MRIs for
everywhere that hurt: wrists, knees, back, and left ankle (the right one hadn’t
started hurting yet).
Once we got the results back he confirmed level four chondromalacia in
my knees (Google it … level four is reserved for NBA players and other serious
athletes!) and ganglions in my wrist. His suggestion was that he would operate
on my knees before doing anything else. By this point, I was so desperate to
not hurt anymore that it didn’t occur to me to ask him to look at the MRIs for
my ankle and back so he could tell me what was wrong there.
And this is why I’ve cautioned you to be so careful! I’ve now been
injected with something that hasn’t helped and I’m being told I need surgery.
And I’m not questioning anything because I’m just so desperate to not live in
pain anymore! It’s taken me a while to forgive the GPs and this specialist for
what they did to me, what they didn’t do to me, and what they wanted to do to
me. Forgive, but never forget. While on one level, how dare you tell someone in chronic pain there’s
nothing you can do to help and they have to learn how to live with it? How dare
you suggest cutting into someone who absolutely doesn’t have anything that
requires being cut into?, on another, they’re doing the best they can
because that’s what they know. I really do need to believe this last part
otherwise it will forever haunt me that these people were willing to not help
me, at best, and cause me pain, at worst, just so they could feel good about
themselves. I need to believe that they were honestly just trying, using the
most useless and irrelevant tools they have, to cut a square peg so it fits in
a round hole.
When I told my parents about the surgery it gave them the opportunity to very strongly agree on something (which is rare): I was not, under any circumstances, going to have any operations until I’d gotten second opinions from their chosen specialists – they each have one and then they have one that they agree on – the next time I was in Lebanon.
Eventually, after a bunch of arguing, I agreed under one condition: if
any specialist said I didn’t need surgery, I would walk out of the clinic and
we would never discuss my operation again.
I just wanted to be fixed and stop hurting all day every
day everywhere. I wanted my life back!
This now takes us to the summer of 2017 and, with my MRI results in my
bag, I’m heading to the first of three appointments with a specialist. The
following is, I kid you not, exactly what happened. After a short wait, his
receptionist informs me that I can go in. As I walk into his office and am
shutting the door he asks what the problem is. “I hurt everywhere.” I say. “How
old are you?” he asks, as I’m walking to the chair. “38.” I say. “Are you
stressed?” he asks, as I’m sitting down and pulling out my MRI results. “Isn’t
everyone these days?” I joke. “You have fibromyalgia.” he says.
Honestly. That’s exactly what happened. I did try to argue with him. Of
course I tried to argue with him! I mean, all these years of no diagnosis and
I’m getting ready to go and have surgery and he’s saying I have something I
know I can’t have because I don’t fit the symptoms I’ve read about online. And
not only that, he’s saying it within the first 30 seconds of meeting me and
without looking at the MRI results. I have chondromalacia and ganglions
dammit!
Eventually he agreed to look at the results (totally just to humor me, I
know). He confirmed a mild case of chondromalacia in my knees (remember who
level four is for) that wouldn’t have gotten any better in the long run with
surgery and confirmed that no, I didn’t have even a single ganglion in my
wrist. In fact, I had indentations where the ganglions would have been because
ganglions tend to look for empty spaces to fill. He prescribed Cymbalta, an
antidepressant which I now know is one of the most common ways of treating
fibro symptoms.
I was very confused. But I didn’t get ahead of myself. I had two more
specialists to go to and who knew how those would go.
I’ll tell you how they went. Exactly the way the first one did. Almost
word for word and movement for movement except these ones didn’t even humor me
by looking at the MRI results.
They both prescribed pregabalin, an anti-seizure medication that’s also
used to treat nerve damage in diabetics (remember the insulin resistance, see
how that came back to our story?) and, mentioned in the insert of one of the
brand name medications it’s marketed under, fibro. I figured two votes for
pregabalin outnumbered one vote for Cymbalta so I chose to try the pregabalin.
As for my threat to walk out and have the operation, regardless; that went away
quite quickly. I don’t know why. I really don’t.
After about maybe a week of taking the pills I was finally, for the first
time in years, totally pain-free! Are you reading that?? Pain-free!!!! I went
on holiday with my mum and one of my sisters and I was able to go to the gym
without the braces (which I always carried with me whenever I traveled anyway)
and go to the beach and lay down on the sand and stand and walk and sit
comfortably. Normally.
And then one day the pain came back. And it never went away again. I have
good days or weeks or months or years and bad days or weeks or months or years.
But I haven’t been pain-free since September of 2017.
So that’s my story. And despite how long and convoluted it is, there’s a
lot I haven’t spoken about and that will come in future posts. Things like
how the psychoneuroimmunologist saved my life and the different things I’ve tried.
For now, I just wanted to share my story. If it doesn’t resonate with you
and you have chronic pain that no amount of doctors or pills have been able to
fix, please don’t disregard it. Remember, everyone’s experience is different and I'm here to help as much as I can.
Albert Einstein
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