How Pain Has Impacted My Life, Part 1

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September has been designated Pain Awareness Month as part of the Decade of Pain Research and Treatment, established by Congress and effective as of January 2001.  According to the National Center for Medical Statistics over 70 million Americans report that they experience pain, many living with severe chronic pain, for which effective treatment is limited.  I believe that unless we have lived with chronic pain we cannot understand the impact it can have on a person’s life; which is one reason why Pain Awareness Month is so important.

There are other issues that need to be addressed, including the need for additional research funding, better medical education about pain management, and reasonable policies and laws about the availability of pain medications, however in this and some future Share Posts I am going to discuss what a person in pain experiences on a daily basis; emotionally, physically, and financially.  I am going to start at the beginning, in 1963, when I first started having back pain, and over the next few weeks will cover topics that lead up to the present; I am confident that most of you will identify with what I write and I hope you will feel free to comment.

Having lived with spine and leg pain for over 40 years I believe I can speak to these issues with both knowledge and sensitivity.  Pain is the number one reason why people seek medical care and is why most people leave work and obtain Social Security, and yet so little is known about the physiology of pain and the repercussions it has on a person’s life.  Totally independent of my spine condition, in the mid-90s I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, a progressive and often disabling condition, which added to my physical limitations and forced me to make the very difficult decision to end my career, one I worked hard to build and enjoyed immensely. 

Since I was a young girl I have lived with pain in my back, although the orthopedists I saw then did not believe that it was as bad as I indicated, in fact over the years I was told everything from it was from growing pains to women can’t handle stress so they get headaches and backaches.  I was once told if I just let go of my stress my pain would go away.  I had a pretty nice life at 13 and wasn’t aware of what stress I was supposed to let go.  Over the years I was hospitalized and put in traction, was prescribed every possible pain medication, to varying degrees of success, wore a partial body cast for several months in my senior year in high school, and for many years wore a back brace with six metal rods that went from the top to bottom, and whenever I bent over to pick something up the rods kept my shirt standing straight up on the top.  No way was I going to get away without anyone knowing I was corseted up like Scarlet in Gone With the Wind.  I have also, over the years, had a total of five surgeries, four of them major surgeries and I now have rods and screws holding my spine stable.