It is Possible to Overcome Chronic Pain

During a basketball game in my senior year of high school, I sustained a knee injury that ended my basketball career instantly. For a number of years, the knee bothered me constantly, and frequently would fill up with fluid, requiring draining. I would wind up on crutches for weeks before the swelling would finally subside.

A decade or so later, I sprained the right knee. After that, both knees were quicky and I had to be careful how I stepped. This went on for many years. Strangely, after I was well past middle age, my knees started bothering me less and less. This may have been due to my starting taking glucosamine sulfate, which seemed to help almost as soon as I took the first dose.

Unfortunately, about the time the knees got better, the left hip started hurting a great deal of the time. I've often wondered if I damaged the hip by favoring the knee. Six or seven years ago, the pain in my hip, leg, and back became constant.

Pain ran down my left leg, eventually involving the entire leg and foot. A spot deep in my left "cheek" burned like I was being branded with a hot iron. There was increasing pain in my groin, leaving me to wonder if the inguinal hernia repair that had been done a few years earlier had come undone.

There was no way I could get comfortable in bed, in a recliner, or on the couch. Riding in the car was sheer agony, and the only way I could tolerate it at all was by using a heated, vibrating cushion while traveling. The only time I was pain free was when I was in a hot tub. Sometimes I would go to the hot tub in the middle of the night because I could get no relief otherwise. My husband was afraid I would fall asleep and drown.

My family doctor had x-rayed the hip, but thought the pain was from pressure on a nerve trapped between two vertebrae. MRI's showed degenerated disks in my lower back, confirming his opinion. I was prescribed Celebrex and through the years, numerous other pain medications, but none of them helped much. I quit some of them after hearing the announcement that those medications could cause heart attacks.

As time went by, I felt more and more pain, spreading all over my body. It took larger and larger amounts of pain medication just to make it through the day. The nights were even worse. And, as if I didn't already have enough problems, eventually I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia.

From time to time, a friend would call me up and tell me about someone who had found a miraculous cure for what seemed to be the same problem I was having. So I would drive wherever necessary to see yet another doctor. They all said it was my back, none of them wanted to operate, and none knew what else to do for me.

Once I was referred to a doctor at a famous bone and joint clinic 200 miles away from my hometown. He was the team doctor for one of the top college football teams in the country. My friend said she had gone into the hospital in a wheel chair and walked out a couple of days later, thanks to this doctor. I called to try to make an appointment with him, but was told I would have to see a PA in the clinic first, as the doctor was traveling with the team at the time.

When I saw the PA, he confirmed what the other doctors had said. My pain was coming from the sciatic nerve which was pinched between two vertebrae. He recommended injections in my back and wanted to set me up for them. I told him, as tactfully as possible, that I preferred to wait till I could see the doctor himself. Before leaving the clinic, I made another appointment to see the team doctor.

The next day, I received a call from the clinic, informing me of an appointment they had made, against my wishes, for me to have the injections at a stand-alone clinic in the same city. The appointment was set for the same day and an hour earlier than my upcoming doctor's appointment.

I told them to cancel the appointment, because I didn't know if my insurance would cover it. When I checked, I learned the injections would be $1500 each, and the insurance wouldn't pay for it. I had no desire to have the injections anyway, as both my brother and my son had had them for back problems similar to mine and had not found them beneficial. I was sure I would have similar results if I agreed to have them.

When I saw the doctor, he said he and the PA had studied my MRI's together and decided the trapped nerve or nerves didn't involve the sciatic nerve after all. He said the pain was the same and probably just as severe as the sciatic nerve would have been, but the injections wouldn't help. Of course that made me doubly glad I had cancelled the appointment I hadn't wanted made in the first place.

I asked about surgery to release the nerves, and the doctor said, "If you were MY mother, I wouldn't recommend surgery for you at all." And then, to add insult to injury, he said, "We just don't get better as we get older." Besides feeling more disappointment at receiving no help, I now felt very OLD.

As both my pain and my older brother's grew more and more severe, he was finally referred to a surgeon who agreed to operate. After trying unsuccessfully for 30 years to find a doctor who would operate, he had reached the point where he could not walk unaided. He had no feeling in his feet so had to watch where he placed his feet if he tried to walk alone. The surgery helped him so much that he was soon repairing his roof and building new cabinets for his kitchen. He urged me to see his surgeon, in hopes that he could help me as well.

So I made the appointment, picked up the MRI's of my back from the hospital, and went to see the doctor. He looked at them and had new x-rays made of my hip. Then he told me that while he knew I had major back problems, he thought most of the pain was from the hip itself. He wanted me to see an orthopedic doctor in his clinic.

I made an appointment with the orthopedic doctor, who agreed with the surgeon. He said I needed my hip replaced. That came as a shock, as I hadn't actually thought of that. I said I would think about it. Then he suggested injections in the hip. I said I would think about that as well.

So I made an appointment with a different orthopedic doctor in a different clinic, for a second opinion. This doctor said he agreed that the hip was bad and probably needed to be replaced. But, he said, even if the hip were to be replaced, I would still have so much back pain that it wouldn't be worth putting me through the hip surgery. He recommended putting me back on Celebrex. He said he took it himself, and had no fear of it. I felt I had no choice.

So I was back to square one.

Meanwhile, I could no longer completely straighten the left leg, nor bend it any to speak of. I was drawn over like an old crone. People constantly remarked about the pain they could see on my face. My husband voiced concern that I would soon be unable to walk at all. It was not a good feeling.

Then, late last year, a woman at church noticed the way I was walking and asked about it. When she learned of my problem, she told me about a world-renowned surgeon who had given her son a new hip,and she raved about how much it had helped him. I decided to try one more time.

We drove 200 miles in the opposite direction from the team doctor and saw the doctor she had recommended. He looked at my MRI's and other x-rays, which I had been required to bring along, ordered a new x-ray of the hip, and then came in to see me. After a brief examination, he said, "Poor lady. Your hip is worn out and needs to be replaced." He showed my husband and me on the x-ray how the hip was worn.

I hadn't mentioned having any back problems at all, but of course he had seen the MRI's of my back. As he was leaving the room, he turned around and said, "Now this won't fix your back. But I think you're damaging your back by walking the way the hip forces you to."

So a few weeks later, this doctor replaced my hip. The first week was, to put it mildly, not a fun time. The anesthetic and pain medication made me deathly sick, but I suppose it kept the pain down some. I had the surgery on Tuesday, and made the long trip home on Friday.

Since the narcotic pain medication continued to make me sick and cause hallucinations, I decided to leave it off and just take a couple of Tylenol. It was enough. Within a week of the surgery, I was getting by on one or two Tylenol tablets a day. There was some degree of surgical pain, but after the first few days, it was mild compared to the pain I had been having before the surgery.

The day my doctor released me from the hospital, he told me that I would need no therapy for the hip. Just doing what I had to do would be enough. And it was.

My husband took off two weeks from work and stayed home with me, caring for me as no nurse could have done. I did the prescribed exercises and progressed as expected. Remarkably, since the surgery I have little pain, aside from some expected back pain when I try to do too much in a day. But it's nothing compared to the pain I had before the surgery. I feel that the pain which led to my being diagnosed with fibromyalgia was possibly just referred pain from the hip and back problems, or from my muscles and nerves always being drawn up from that pain.

Before the surgery, I was on six prescriptions, including Nexium, which I had been taking for stomach pain, caused, no doubt, by the pain medications. Today the only prescription medication I take is thyroid for hypothyroidism. I take aspirin right after breakfast every morning, as recommended by my gyn as a precaution against blood clots, and on days when I work hard, I may take a couple of Advil (ibuprofen) later in the day.

Most nights I can go to bed and be asleep in minutes, where before it took hours, on the nights I was able to sleep at all. I've been walking up to two miles and hope to build up to four miles a day.

After the surgery, our hot tub was getting so little use that we decided to give it to our son, who still has a lot of hip and back problems. We also ordered an inversion therapy table and had it delivered to him. I'm praying that he will soon find the relief I've found. It may take surgery for him, too, but we're hoping he may be able to avoid it. The inversion therapy table has helped him already.

One of the happiest perks from my surgery is that I can now stand up straight. Recently I ran into an old classmate from high school whom I hadn't seen in a few months. After we had spent several minutes together, he said,"Now I know what's different about you. You can stand up and look me in the eye."

When I think back on what I went through all those years, and put my family through as well, it makes me angry. Some doctors seem to think that just because you're getting on in years, they should just prescribe more and more drugs and try to ease the pain a bit till your time runs out.

What's more, you don't even have to be getting on in years to have trouble finding help. It's just too much easier to label a problem "fibromyalgia" or "chronic pain syndrome" than it is to work seriously at finding the remedy.

I've worked hard all my life, not because I had to, in most cases, but because I enjoy hard work. I had expected to be able to keep going well into my eighties. I know life doesn't always work out the way you plan it, but I just wasn't ready to hang up my chef's hat and nail apron before I was out of my sixties.

Every day I thank God for the miracle that got me back on my feet and allowed me to keep going for a while longer.

I would like to advise anyone who suffers from chronic pain as I did, not to give up. Perhaps you, too, may receive a miracle. Maybe you won't. But we have to have hope to survive. And every day, with the advances of modern medical science, there is more to hope for.