My journey entering the health field begins as most practitioner stories do: with a personal experience of pain. For me, it was debilitating nerve pain. I had pain and fatigue that was so overwhelming that I was bed-ridden about half of each month for about eight years. It's a wonder how I even kept a job or functioned for as long as I did.
By the eighth year, I was freaking out that my only option left was to go on disability, and that the rest of my life would be a never-ending torture of seeing my goals and dreams slip through my fingers. I had struggled for so long to try to juggle my pain flares and my external life, but I was beyond stressed and exhausted and didn't want to fight it any more.
The triggering event that kickstarted all of this happened in 2008 when I was hit by a car while riding my scooter. I went flying off my scooter after I was rear-ended by a car going full speed, driven by a person who hadn't noticed the traffic had stopped due to a backup. All the air was knocked out of me when I landed hard on the road, and thankfully, I was wearing a helmet, because I also hit my head hard on the concrete.
After the accident, I couldn't move out of bed for about a week, and it took me another week to regain my ability to walk again. The miraculous thing is that nothing was broken, but I had awful pain all over: in my right shoulder, my back, my hips, and my head. It felt like my body was broken in many places.
THE AFTERMATH OF THE ACCIDENT
I had no clue what to do, so I fell prey to one of those ambulance chaser law offices when they approached me. The rehabilitation clinic they sent me to was a huge scam; the treatment I got was awful and did absolutely nothing to treat my injuries. After much insistence on my part, I was referred to various specialists, but after many examinations and tests, they all said that there was nothing wrong with me besides some soft tissue damage.
This declaration from official health practitioners that there was "nothing wrong with me" was one of the most harmful impediments to my proper rehabilitation. Nobody in my life, including the doctors, took soft tissue injuries seriously. I was in school full time and working full time, and my bosses and professors took doctor's notes as law. And since the doctors said there was no significant reason for my pain, there was no justifiable reason for me to miss school or work.
I constantly wished that I had broken something or had a tangible, visible injury. I wished for something, anything that other people could actually see and accept as real - so they would have actually given me their sympathy and understanding. I was constantly dismissed, treated with impatience and lack of compassion by people who felt like I had no good reason for needing time off or extra care. The pressure I felt to recover quickly created a lot of extra stress and tension, which I know now to be major impedances to proper injury recovery.
Since I couldn't use my right arm for almost a month (my dominant hand) and was in art school at the time, I fell behind in classes. My teachers recommended that I drop out of the semester. I made up all the work from missing class (and more), but they refused to make an exception and still dropped my grades based on my imperfect attendance. At work, my bosses lost patience quickly and I got written up for attendance as well.
MY INTRODUCTION TO CHRONIC PAIN
Over the next month, I very slowly started to feel like I was recovering, but to my extreme dismay, I woke up one day to discover that I couldn't move again! My body was in so much pain, it almost felt like the accident had just happened! Needless to say, I was terrified to find myself back in this situation.
In the midst of this alarming situation, I tried to reach out to all the health care practitioners I could, but the doctors couldn't give me a reason why this was happening. The only solution they had was to manage it through pain medication and rest. I spent a few days in bed, and then struggled through the pain to get back to work and school.
Little did I know that this cycle of flares of pain would happen in various degrees of intensity many many times over the next 8 years.
THE PAIN FLARE CYCLE WENT A LITTLE LIKE THIS:
I would wake up and not be able to move. My entire body felt like it was on fire, and nothing would help the pain except strong painkillers or muscle relaxers. They didn't alleviate the pain, but they at least knocked me out so I didn't feel it.
I never knew how long the flare was going to last, so I couldn't plan on anything. Sometimes it was just a day, sometimes it was up to 5 days. At some point, the pain would usually relent enough where I could get out of bed, but I never knew when that was going to be.
It was a constant struggle to know when I was going to be "functional," and an insane and fruitless game of guessing the future to know if I would eventually feel good enough to just miss part of the day, or have to cancel/call in sick entirely. I had to communicate all that as well as forecast how long I was going to be out of commission to my professors, bosses, and friends. It was a
demoralizing task, constantly having to apologize and ask for extensions or special considerations.
Since painkillers knocked me out, they were usually a last resort, so I spent a majority of the time trying to fight the pain enough to attend to my responsibilities. I also spent a lot of time trying to make up for my issues by overachieving and overcompensating in other ways so I could feel less of a failure.
everything below here needs to be tended, is a work in progress:
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my settlement took forever and the money i received for how much disfunction the accident caused in my life was laughable. it barely covered any treatments outside the completely ineffective accident clinic.
when i wasn't bedridden, i'd spend my time fighting to catch up from the days i lost, and spent a lot of this time in a brain fog, with fatigue, and and achy body. there might be a week or so here where i would feel somewhat functional before i would wake up and feel like crap again, if not entirely immobile. this cycle went on for the next 8 years. i would start to feel like i was getting better, then out of nowhere, wake up in pain again. i tried to track the cycles to see if there was a cause for the trigger, but there was nothing, no causation or correlation that i could find.
one of the worst parts of the pain was that i couldn't do any movement without getting so exhausted i would have to lay down or fall asleep. the doctors kept telling me to try to move, and one recommended rebounding gently, but that was even too much for me.
after a year of this mysterious pain and more doctor's visits, i ended up at a rheumatologist with an official fibromyalgia diagnosis. i was actually relieved in a way. i had something concrete that was actually wrong with me! but i was also told the same thing that probably anyone who has received a fibromyalgia diagnosis has been told, there is no cure, and that it is a lifelong condition. so with that relief was the life sentence that i was going to feel like this for the rest of my life.
(link to blog post about why diagnoses aren't helpful most of the time )
so what did i do for the next 8 years? i obsessively tried to find a cure!
the first few years, i went the rheumatology route and took medication. at the time, i was already on an anti-depressant, so they just changed me to a different type (an SNRI) which they told me was more effective for my condition. it didn't really help with the pain, but i guess it made me feel slightly better about it. i eventually stopped because the withdrawals were awful if i ever missed a dose. for years, multiple doctors acted like i was crazy when i told them i got brain zaps as a withdrawal symptom and basically told me there was no such thing, but if you look up brain zaps and anti-depressant withdrawals on the internet today, you will see it is very much a thing. at that time, there wasn't much information available on the internet about how to deal with these mysterious issues and health problems except on obscure forums.
i spent a lot of time on these forums reading about how fibromyalgia could be actually caused other things, so tried colon cleanses, parasite cleanses, liver flushes, heavy metal detoxes to see if any of those things could be the root cause of my condition. this was before the medical medium had come out with a popular book talking about viruses causing chronic conditions, so it was just random people sharing their anecdotal personal trials and experiments.
every year i got more and more desperate (read my post about how pain is a catalyst for change), i quit smoking cigarettes, i quit drinking alcohol for 30 days (something i had never done since i had started drinking. i was in quite a bit of denial that drinking almost every night was unhealthy being in the service industry and then the wine industry for over a decade. after i quit drinking for 30 days, i never had the same relationship with alcohol again and gradually enjoyed drinking less and less. which was a positive benefit.
i tried herbalists, korean herbalists, nutritionists, acupuncturists, naturopaths, chiropractors (and all their various add-on treatments like frequency machines), and different specialist & doctors for all the random symptoms that i would develop over the years.
i tried different types of bodywork and energywork: massage, trigger point therapy, thai/korean/chinese massage like shiatsu & tuina, rolfing, Bowen, Reiki. once early in my journey when i was still very weak, i lined up and waited all day outside this supposedly miraculous healer's house with a group of people only to be told when it was my turn that my constitution was too weak to be treated. they were right actually, most of the time, the bodywork just made me feel worse. but it felt awful to be turned away like that.
i tried different types of movement like yoga as well, but it was hard to keep up a routine since i would still wake up randomly and not be able to move and then be out of commission for so many days. movement practices were very draining as well, and many times after i would find myself back in bed after trying even the most gentle exercise.
under orders from nutritionist and sometimes voluntarily, i tried diets like paleo, macrobiotics, whole 30, veganism. the worst was korean constitution diet where i was told not to eat green vegetables or drink very much water. i usually tried to do a diet for a minimum of a month and up to 6 months, but i only lasted about 2 weeks on that one because i was so constipated. i did try keto just for fun after my recovery because i wanted to see how it felt and that was the only other diet that i hated and could only do for a few weeks.
so when did things finally start to turn around? after trying many types - nervous system - something perked me up about that - someone recommended i try craniosacral therapy. after my first session, i was so tired i went to bed immediately. i felt like total crap for a couple days, but low and behold, the third day i woke up and felt really good! like almost normal! i felt good for a few more days before i felt could feel the fatigue and pain returning. i'm not sure how long i went to this therapist. i went weekly at first, but i really wanted to try to get down to every other week. my entire goal was to get to the point where i could stop going entirely. (mindset of treatments/self care being something to fix and move on)
after a few sessions, the time i spent feeling crappy post-session decreased, and the feeling good times got gradually longer, but it still wasn't consistent. and it was expensive to go so often, so i started looking at trainings to see if there was a way i could learn the work so i could work on myself to save money.
i found a free intro - go into Gary's free intro
all he did was set his fulcrums and her pain went down from a lvl 8 out of 10 to ZERO
he didn't even touch her!
the first craniosacral class:
knew it was where i wanted to be
demo, started crying on the table- knew that the pain had led me there, something made sense
afraid, nervous about touching other people
but hopeful, connected and awoke something in me that wanted to know more about the process
next post:
the road to recovery pt. 2: changing the pain patterns
changing my mind about money
i ask myself this all the time! and the honest answer is that there isn't just one thing. but, i can name some important steps in the journey.
PTSD framework?