Chronic Pain

Hello All

I have been having such a wonderful time on your site. I originally started here with my own page, then I discovered the share post and then finally I stumbled onto your forums.

I'm a chronic Spinal pain and Fibro patient. I've had trouble with my spinal pain for many years, but I would have a flare up, stay down, rest for a few days, I normally tried to avoid any type of meds and usually went to my chiropractor and got some adjust ments and when the pain subsided in a few days or weeks, I was back to doing every thing I wanted to do until the next time I fell or had some type of problem.
I raced and trained horses for many years of my life, I can now recall some behaviors during my teens that should of tipped me off that I was damaging my spine, but I never figured it out, as I got older I would have bouts of flares in my spine and I would go through my own idea of treatments and go on.
The mistake I made, was that I never went to a MD to have x-rays or MRI studies done and did not want to take meds so avoided doctors just to stay away from their treatments.
I've been bucked off and thrown, drug, fallen on top of by a 1,000 lb horse, kicked in the abdomen and thrown several feet in the air backwards, the trauma that my body has taken without ever knowing that I had broken any bones is really amazing.
I'm an idiot and never pain much attention to the pain I experienced and just kept riding and training.
As I got older, I began having more frequent bouts of spinal pain flares and started having to take more and more time off of work and also had to quit my jobs several times, because the recovery times were stretched into months and weeks.
In 2002 my eldest son very tragically took his own life. The shock, the grief and the extended amount of stress as I was trying to work hard at hiding my own grief and worked on getting help for my husband and younger son. I tried to set my own grief and despair on the back burner and although I did not do a very good job of it and we really had a heavey stress load I internalized my stress and grief and tried to get my family back to some normalcy. About 10 months after my eldest sons death, I sneezed really hard one day while I had a cold, I heard a loud crack, popping noise come from my lower spine and the pain dropped me to my knees. I went into emergency and found out later, that I had actually fractured 2 disc in my lower spine and L3 & L5.
This was the beginning of my life with pain and the end of my life as a healthy person.
After 3.5 4 years of constant care, and working with a pain specialist at my pain clinic, going thru pain mgt classes they offered and seeing every kind of spinal specialsit that I could get a referral too. I had begun educating my self on the hows and whys of pain management and had begun a pain diary as suggested by my pain classes and then also at the American Pain foundation forums. I keep an online pain diary that is very thorough and it prints out very complete and professional reports for your doctors to view. I brought my pain diary from over the course of about 2.5 months to my pain doctors apt, after she viewed my pain diary, she had her nurse call me back to let me know that my questions and concerns over all these new symptoms, were becuase I had Fibromyalgia. Since then, I have been working hard every day to read and study about FMS and what I have to do to learn to live with this.
The combination of both problems can be very overwhelming at times. If I have my FMS under control, the spinal pain will flare, if I get the spinal pain under control, the FMS flares over no seemingly valid reason.
I sometimes think that the dreadful extreme fatigue is nearly worse than the pain. The combination has been a huge challenge, I've had to rearrange my entire life, my family has had the stress of my not being the person I used to be, we have suffered financially due to the fact, that I cannot hold a job, as I'm not ever able to sit, stand, lay, or do anything for more than a few minutes, I've not even had a pain free day for more than four years.
I've tried a million different treatments and although I have found a few that help to control pain, I've never had anything completely take care of it. I am one of the fortunate ones that have two doctors working together to get me my medications and make adjust ments to try and help me. Every few months I go in for a radio frequency oblation procerdure, as It does give me some relief with a certain part of the pain, that when it flares I'm barely able to care for myself or even walk very well. So I go through these dreadfully painful procedures, just to get some relief of only a part of the pain.
I never really understood how or why I got FMS, but just the other day while reading information off this site, Karen Richards had written an article about the possibility of a traumatic event in your life causing FMS and especially if you are already predisposed to having the illness.
I have also realized that both my mom and my sister suffer bouts of migraines every month or two that also are accompanied by severe pain all over their bodies and they will have to stay down in bed for 3 or 4 days until the pain passes and then they are back to normal for a few more weeks. They both suffer many of the symptoms of FMS/Chronic Fatigue but at this time are not interested in finding out if they too have Fibro, but I'm pretty suspicious and do feel that I have a family predisposition for this illness too.
I'm really happy to meet you all and am thrilled to of found your web-site. I look forward to participating in your discussions, share post and I hope that other will want to join my site and so we can support one another.
Oh, almost forgot! I'm in the process of starting my own support group in our community to help others and support them as they learn to live with their own pain.

Thank you for letting me come and participate
It's already been great
Betty