MY CHRONIC PAIN STORY
(And why I recovered despite being told I never would)
By Linda Crawford
(This is the first of a series of stories about my experience)
Friday, October 23, 2009.
My alarm went off at 4:50 am and I was at the gym by 5:15, ready for the early morning Bootcamp workout I attended four times a week. By 8 am I was on the skilled nursing floor of the hospital reading the medical chart of the first patient I was seeing as a per-diem occupational therapist. It read something like this:
60-something female, minor knee injury, reports high levels of pain, minimum assist for transfers and mobility. No major medical issues.
After reading the therapy notes from the day before and talking with the patient’s shift nurse, I went in to start my therapy session. We worked on transferring from the chair to the bed to complete training in dressing in the bed. She needed only minimal assistance for the transfer.
All was well — for the first 30 minutes. Then “it” happened.
In a split second, in the middle of transferring from the bed to a wheelchair, she “dropped.” No warning, no sign of impending weakness, no fainting…no reason. Just dropped all her weight on me. I instinctively caught her and got her into the wheelchair.
She was fine. I was not.
I had been transferring patients for 20 years and nobody had ever “dropped” before. At a happy, healthy and fit 50 years old, I mistakenly thought I couldn’t get hurt doing my job. I was baffled at how a “minimum assist” had turned into a fully dependent assist in the blink of an eye.
I found out later that she had done the same thing at least twice the night before, but nobody bothered to chart it or pass the information along to the next shift. My heroic save ended up saving the rest of the staff from getting hurt, but I was to pay dearly for it.
After the obligatory Workman’s Compensation “wait and see” period (while you hurt like crazy, but don’t know what’s wrong because it might just be a muscle strain and we won’t pay for tests until you’re still hurting after 60 days) I was diagnosed with a left medial meniscus tear, a right thoracic rib displacement and a thoracic muscle strain.
Not great, but not too terribly bad. Except I had to be back on the job in two weeks or lose my job. And that stubborn rib would not go back in place. PT tried. Massage therapy tried. My last resort, or lose my job, was to try a chiropractic adjustment. Everyone thought it was my only hope.
I have to be honest about my story here — I was not a fan. I had had a chiropractor adjust my neck some 25 years prior and suffered a cervical disc injury. So yeah, not a fan. But it was my “only hope” so I relented and went to see the 300 pound miracle man who promised to “make a believer of me” (his real words).
The first visit wasn’t too bad. I didn’t like it, but it was pretty gentle. The second visit he had none of my paperwork or history from the first visit, and, since he had promised to have me “healed” in 3 visits, he went for it with the back adjustments. All 300 pounds of him.
The rib still refused to go back in place.
Determined to “heal” me, he had me lay on my left side, and, holding my right hip and knee in flexion, did a rotational adjustment on my right lower back and pelvis.
I saw stars and thought I was going to throw up.
When I sat up, he asked me how I felt. I remember saying “dizzy — really, really dizzy.” I was also nauseous and overall felt like I had just been run over, but I could barely make the words.
I was in state of semi-shock as I began to walk out of the room and across the clinic. To this day I can tell you exactly what the room looked like, the lighting, where the front desk and door were, and where my car was parked. I can play the movie in my head of every single step. Every step played in slow motion and in high definition. I clearly remember thinking, “Something is wrong. Something is really wrong with my walking, and my body.”
When I got home I was apparently as white as a sheet. And the pain had started. I took Advil — all day that day. And every day after that for the next 3+ years…
My chronic pain story began that day. Truthfully, I was not yet in chronic pain, I was in acute pain for the next three to four months from the injury. As I should have been, I was hurt.
But nobody wanted to take responsibility for my hurt, (because it wasn’t from the patient transfer) and my doctor and therapist didn’t know how to help me heal. They tried, but I kept getting worse, not better. Narcotics made me sick so Advil was my only pain reliever — and it barely took the edge off.
A year after I had heroically saved my patient from harm, I was hurting so badly I could barely leave the house. Riding in the car was excruciating. Walking more than a few feet was painful. Sitting, sleeping, cooking, laundry, and even laughing — anything and everything hurt.
I was living (barely) with a level 7–8 pain every day. I isolated and only talked to friends on the phone, never telling them how much I hurt. My husband didn’t know what to do for me. Grocery shopping would put me in bed for two days. My garden was overgrown, my bills were late getting paid, I had put on 25 pounds, my house was a mess, and so was I.
My therapist gave up. My doctor said “I don’t know what else to do for you,” and told me I was headed for the dreaded MMI (“we give up”) rating.
It was a despondent Wednesday in mid-October 2010 when I went to see my doctor and she told me there was no hope for me. I went home and cried until I could cry no more.
Then I got mad. Because I believed in healing. I had been a therapist for 20 years and if I had to accept there was no hope for me . . . well . . . then the value I had believed and built my professional and personal life on was wrong. And I knew, I just knew, it couldn’t be true.
There had to be hope.
I opened the lid to my laptop. Google search was my hope. There had to be someone, somewhere, that knew how to treat what was wrong with me. I was willing to go anywhere, find a way to pay for anything, if it would help me heal. I had to believe it was possible — it was the only thread of a hope of living I had left to hold onto.
It didn’t take long to find someone, and only 1½ hours, not thousands of miles, away.
I emailed this sounds-to-good-to-be-true-but-I-think-you-can-help-me therapist and told her a short version of my story. Would she take me on as a patient? Yes. It turned out to be the best “yes” I’d ever received. On my next visit to the doctor, as she was preparing to start the beginning of the end of my treatment, I came in armed with the evidence that I could be helped.
Miraculously, she agreed to let me try.
During my first visit to the new therapist, as I was lying face down on the therapy table while she evaluated my back, in the middle of sharing my pain story, she stopped me and said, “I just want you to know, you did everything right. You did nothing wrong. It’s not your fault.”
I sobbed. Sobbed. Like I had not sobbed in the 16 months since I had first been injured. I realized that up until that moment I had been treated like it was my fault.
I had found more than a great therapist — I had found empathy. I can tell you, in all honesty, that just as my initial injury had happened in the blink of an eye, my healing began in that very moment.
To be continued . . .
