My Painful Admission

This is not something I like to talk about much, and it's not easy to type this now. However.... here I go. If you are a regular here at I Was Born2Cree8, you know that I have been in a lot of pain and, because it might help others in similar situations, I am going to talk about it now.

My spiritual beliefs are that we create in our lives by what we think about, what we focus our attention on, so I know that writing about pain is not the way to create a healthy, happy body. However, when you hurt like this it's very difficult if not impossible to not think about pain. So far I have not found a way to think healthy, happy body when I feel pain.

FIBROMYALGIA, CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME, DEPRESSION, MEMORY LOSS, DETERIORATED DISCS, HERNIATED DISC, ARTHRITIS in my spine.

Yes, these are all a part of my every day life. Some I've been living with for 25 years now, and some have developed over the last few years. Or maybe they developed longer ago than that, but just got to a point of where they could no longer be ignored in the last couple years. Bottom line: I live in a lot of pain!!

I have days where things are pretty good. I can go to the dog park and walk Reba with a minimum of pain for the most part, or at least in comparison.... and I have days where I can barely get out of bed, and certainly can't leave my home... and I have mostly days somewhere in between. My family doctor and the Internist I see have both told me they want me to loose weight, and yet they can't tell me how. What the doctors can tell me is that there's nothing they can do and I just have to live with the pain. For 25 years I've been told I just have to live with the pain. Family longevity on both sides goes into the 90s... I'm only 52 and I don't want to live another 49 years like this.

January 28, 1983, I was in a car crash. It was early hours of the morning and I was on my way home from a nearby town where I'd visited my mother and gone to the lounge to listed to my friend Alayne entertain. Alayne was a guitar player and singer as well as a good friend, and she passed away some time ago now. Anyway, after the lounge closed she and I went to the night club and finished the night off visiting and dancing with some of the guys in there. I'm not a drinker, but always loved to dance, so often went out to the clubs to dance... drinking pop (soda to some of you) or water. On the way home, there was a crash. A full size van hit my Toyota pickup and knocked me off the highway... the truck rolled over once and stopped on its wheels. Or, at least I think that's what happened. The last thing I knew was when the passenger side wheels slid off the icy road, into the ditch, and the driver's side wheels went up in the air. I knew I was about to roll and my last conscious thought was "I hope I die." Not that I really wanted to die, just that I'd rather die than to be mangled; crippled or scarred or anything else devastating. Hey, I had just turned 27 years old 20 days earlier and was single with my life before me. I wanted it to be a good life.

When I was mostly conscious and aware, the fellow that had hit me had already regained control of his van, had parked it, and was about half way out into the "boons" where my truck and I were. Was I really unconscious, or was it just brain shake? I don't know, but I know my brain wasn't working all that great for the first while. Maybe that was part of the shock. Anyway, I had no broken bones or anything like that, it appeared that my only injury was a concussion. It appeared that way for about a day or two when I tried to get up to go to work and couldn't get out of bed, the pain was so bad. Apparently it is normal with this type of thing that it takes a couple days to show up. Whiplash injuries to my neck and upper body. I not only was in a lot of pain, but had lost the use of my left arm (thank God I'm right handed, haha). The body shop was able to fix "Troy" my Toyota (Toy) truck... but the doctors were, and still are, unable to fix my body.

As I type this, I am watching TV, and on ER there is a woman who is dieing. She is having her son video her for her blog. Just had to share that, haha.

The only type of doctor that has really been able to help me is my Chiropractor. He managed to give me back the use of my left arm, and has done a lot of other things to help me maintain a reasonable quality of life. Without Dr. Roze I believe I would be like a pretzel and living in a wheelchair. I really am grateful I am where I am, it could be a lot worse. Also, without Dr. Roze I may by now be dead at my own hand.... without Dr. Roze and my animals that need me and love me and give me a reason to go on.

With the help of pain medications, I continued to work after the initial time off "sick" after the crash. (Most people say accident, but I don't believe most of these things are accidents, I think they are due to human stupidity and lack of proper driving skills.) In order to continue working I had to take Tylonol 3, a prescription drug with codeine in it. The 'scrip' said to take 1 every 4 hours as needed for pain... and to continue working I was taking 3 every 3 hours and still hurting so bad that I had tears running down my face. Yes, my doctor knew how many I was taking, after all, I had to keep getting more and the only way I knew to do that was to get him to write me more 'scrips'. At one point I told 'Dr. Bob' that I felt I was a codeine addict, I must be to be taking such high amounts of it for so long, and wanted to be taken off it and given something else. He said there was nothing else as he wrote another prescription and slid it across the desk to me. I had really liked this doctor and had found him to be very good at his job, but he was frustrated at not being able to help me and I was desperately wanting help. Things deteriorated badly and I finally had to change doctors. You could still do that back then, now we are so short on doctors that people just can't get in as new patients.

Eventually, I was off work again due to my pain and my addiction to the drugs... then I was fired from my job. That was very traumatic. Not that I loved the job, but it was very good money, so was financial security and it gave me value to my family. To my family members, or at least to some of them, you are what you do for a living. To them, I became nothing but a "F***ing Welfare Bum". (I know now that to say what they did to me, they must have felt a lot of fear. My spiritual beliefs are that you either come from a place of love or a place of fear. They did not come from love. I know this now, I did not know it then and it was very very hurtful.)

For a long time, even with the Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue, I still had an active life. As I said earlier, I loved dancing. I went out to the nightclubs a lot, at one point as much as 6 nights a week, to dance. I was a good dancer. I was a Line Dancer and a Texas Two Step dancer... not just the boring dancing that some do, but the fancy, fun stuff... kind of like a combination of Two Step and Jive, the whirling and twirling and all that stuff. I danced fast and rarely sat out a full song throughout the entire evening. Yes, I had to take Tylonol 3 (often called T3), but at least I kept going. I didn't let this stop me completely. "Never say die!" God, how I miss those days!! I miss dancing, and I miss having the 28" waste I had with all that exercise. Back then, no doctors told me to loose weight... I was "hot" and when I walked into a room all heads turned to look at me. Now it's not like that. Now I weigh about 60 pounds more than I did back then.

If you're still with me here, I'm amazed. I didn't expect to write this much and I know it will be a lot for anyone to read. Tears are rolling down my cheeks as I type and I realize this is some kind of catharsis that I must need. I've digressed, I've wandered, I've babbled, and I don't know where this needs to go.


My Chiropractor took x-rays of my back and neck a few times over the years, and he saw a deterioration of the one disc that is between L5 and S1 and the "hammerhead transverse process" on the left side of L5, so we knew some of the pain was from the hammerhead rubbing on the sacrum, near the sacroiliac joint. (A hammerhead transverse process, from what I was told, is a deformation where there's extra bone on the T.P. that makes it look like the head of a hammer.) About a year and a half ago now, the low back pain got worse and worse, so he said he wanted new x-rays, so I asked my GP to get some. We had x-rays done as well as a ... ummm.... can't think of the name of it, but you get put into a big machine that takes pictures of your insides... and it showed that I have the 2 deteriorated discs, a herniated disc, and arthritis in the facet joints. Not good news. It told the Chiropractor what not to do while manipulating my back, so that was a good thing, but still, not good news. My GP said there's nothing they can do about it, and the Chiro said that if/when I get to where I'm really bad they can fuse the vertebrae together, but that can be as bad or worse than what I have.


So.... I'm always searching for something that will help with at least some part of these problems. I have tried pretty much every drug available for the fibromyalgia (FM) and either they don't work for me or they cause other problems that are worse than the FM is. I try to stay off drugs as much as possible, and when I do 'cave' it's prescription pain killers I take, not any illegal/street drugs.

Lately, I've had to miss some things that are very important to me... things I would not miss out on unless I was in a lot of pain, or the very odd time on a holiday, lol. I had to miss church on Sunday, as well as Toastmasters Monday evening and Science Of Mind class on Tuesday eve.

This week my body has been very stiff and sore. Some of the symptoms are: sore knees so bad I find it very painful to have to bend them, even to have to sit on the toilet or get back up again... the entire back including the neck has been sore... both my upper arms have been very painful, especially the right one... my hips and upper legs are sore too. I guess this is from the sciatic nerve involvement from the low back issues.

Recently, I saw an ad on TV that I found very interesting. I went to the website they gave and WOW... it actually gives me some hope of minimizing, if not totally getting rid of the pain. It's an Inversion Table... you hang upside down to let gravity take the pressure off the spine and actually stretch it out a bit for awhile. Apparently many people have been helped by this. I've heard of Inversion Therapy for other things before too, like apparently it helps with depression by bringing more blood to the brain... and it's great for the lymph system which of course is vital to health. It's also good for your colon and other stuff too. I have real hope that this thing could help me a lot to get my life back. It's $339.95US, and I'm sure there will be shipping and handling costs as well as Goods and Services Tax (GST) when it hits Canada. I've posted a Pay Pal Donation button on my blog tonight in the hopes that somebody out there that has extra money that they want to do "a good deed" with will help out some. This is a really big stretch for me to ask for help like this, but here I go. I believe that God is the One Source of all things, and uses various 'channels' to bring to us the prosperity we require. I am opening up to the possibility. I am knowing that God is in action in my life and is bringing me the abundant prosperity I require here and now.... I know that much... I just don't at this moment know what channel the money will come to me through. (And that part is not mine to know.) Mine is just to know... and to be grateful.


EDIT: May 9 - this evening I was finally able to get out of the house after several days of being 'home bound due to pain'. I really had to push myself to go, but am grateful I did go in the end. I went to a rehearsal for an upcoming special event I am taking part in. Anyway, I was talking to one of the ladies there and I forget how it happened, but up came the topic of the Inversion Table. She said she used to have one but had sold it due to having no room in her new home for it, but she was really missing it now. She also has a bad back problem, and she found that the Inversion Table Therapy helped her a lot!!
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