Has anyone been diagnosed with Abdominal Wall Pain

@smiles444
Hi, I am going on 5.5 years since my first sudden onset of upper left quadrant abdominal pain. I have had many diagnoses and yet it is still a mystery and truly excruciating at times. My pain is 8-9 days out of 10. How often is yours? Can you walk normally? What have you tried that works? I have seen 18-20 specialist. I use heat, a TENs, meditation, pain meds, lying still on a 45 degree angle and a number of other meds. Does the pain cause you headaches and nausea when it gets severe? It has been a 5 year science experiment and imaging studies of all types to still not know what or why. Abdominal wall pain, visceral pain, chest wall pain, chronic pain syndrome, etc. It has been labeled all of these. I have received easily 100 injections in my upper abdomen and wrapping around to my back. So, I feel your pain.

@smiles444
I research what I can. For what it's worth you might find this interesting.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4760149/#!po=53.7975

Have you tried working the shoe angle? I have had chronic pain in lower left thoracic and left upper abdominal for 10 years. They have called it chest wall pain, and mostly were puzzled as to how to deal with it. It is most likely due to some scar tissue post op. During the day the pain is fairly low 2-4 generally. It increases when I exercise or walk or stand up for a time (I need to sit down after a few minutes unless I am using some support like a shopping cart.) I wake up from it at night. It is probably connected to some scar tissue. Generally stretching helps. Well, I lately pulled out some MBT shoes I had not used for a long time. They have pronounced rocker soles, and change one's posture and the muscles one uses. It created almost instant change. The pain is milder and less disabling. I am able to stand comfortably for a much longer time. Pain at night has diminished considerably and wakes me up much less. I was very surprised, and I hope this maintains. Note that the new MBT shoes you might buy are not necessarily as good because the company was bought up, and some of the new shoes are not constructed in quite the same way. Look for shoes with good rocker soles and support, that use the original MBT technology. Do not use if you have balance problems though.

Hi @smiles444. I would like to add my welcome to @pagray24's. Welcome to Mayo Clinic Connect! It looks like you have a nice start to information that @pagray24 has offered to you. I'm going to call in @giza and @rdrdhap in hopes that they have even more thoughts to add.

I'm sorry you are having to deal with daily pain- I bet that's tough to do.
Here is some information that Mayo offers on Abdominal pain- https://www.mayoclinic.org/symptoms/abdominal-pain/basics/definition/sym-20050728

Did the steroid injections you had touch the pain at all? Have you thought about adjusting your diet to see if that makes a difference?

Wow, I am so sorry for your pain. It sounds like you have been through it all. Mine started on May 1 of this year. I had quite a few emergency room visits because the pain could get pretty intense. I was starting to get the anti-anxiety prescriptions from the emergency room doctors. At least the abdominal wall pain diagnosis has allowed me calm down a bit and not run to the emergency room. I was worried I was going to get labeled as a hypochondriac and get told to see a therapist. I can go for a time with low-grade pain then there will be a flare-up. Those days make going to work difficult. When the pain is bad, I do get nausea and do not feel like eating. I was curious to see if anyone else had this problem and how they live with it.

Thank you for the link.

I have had two injections. One was by my primary doctor. The second was ultrasound guided. No change in pain. In fact, the pain has gotten worse since the second injection. I have been making changes to my diet but no changes as yet. It is difficult to say what triggers the most painful episodes. I can't determine any correlation between activity and the pain. Thank you for the link.

Yes, I had the same thing happen to me. I would wake up in the middle of night with tremendous pain and ended up going to the ER several times. They took CT scans and blood tests, but everything came back normal. I can take pain and I am not a nervous hypochondriat. Ended up going to a gastroentologist, who came to the conclusion, that I had IBS, after some endostropies. But I still wake up at night with terrible pain and I do not know,
what causes it. I have sometimes put some hot or warm water bottle on it and it seems to help. But is that the answer? And I wake up two or three times.
Doctors seem not be worried, but I am, since I never had problems before. Could eat and drink anything. Travelled internationally a lot, and never even
had an upset stomach. Of course used common sense, when eating some things unknown to me. Now I skip dinner often, because I am afraid of that terrible pain! Does anybody had that problem?
I take ducalex and stool softeners and also a probiotic VSL 3 every day, to make sure, that I do not get constipated.
Should I seek more medical advise?

Good Day,

When I found this forum post, I got excited that the posts were recent. Over the last year I have had abdominal pain and it has been a journey to say the least. I have just started down the abdominal wall pain journey a few months back. But here is my story:

I am a 32 year old male. I started noticing I had random abdominal pain about a year ago today. It was more of a nuisance at the time and I assumed it was muscle strain. Over the next six months it slowly got worse and worse. I would have one bad day and schedule an appt with my PCP then I would not have the pain weeks later at the appt. The pain continued to grow. I started having more and more bad days and the pain started to linger longer. So I thought okay something isn't right. [I also had this weird hernia like muscle spasm pain thing that would bulge out (right below my naval) every now and then. It would also hurt to my urethra, if I pee'd while it flared up it hurt like hell (oddly, ejaculating made it better). This started to become more frequent, from 4/year to 4/month (steadyhealth(dot)com/topics/abdominal-pain-that-is-felt-from-the-belly-button-through-the-peni) in that 20 page post people describe in detail what I had.] So I went to a hernia dr. He said I don't know what the hell is causing your pain but you have an umbilical hernia lets fix it.

He fixed it and also did a larascopy to check for any causes to the pain. This was Sept 2017. To date I have not had the bulge but sometimes when the muscles spasm I feel it in my urethra but it is very mild so I considered that aspect of the surgery a success.

However, immediately after the surgery I had a huge pain in my left side (a 4-6 inches from the naval). I assumed it was just from the surgery, but it was in between the two incisions. A few weeks later, surgery pain was gone but the original pain was now greater. At the time, it really only hurt in that one spot. So I thought the next logical place to go was the GI.

The GI did a scope of my stomach and a colonoscopy. Both came back normal and all blood work looked great. During this time the pain started to jump but the same original place hurt the most and most frequent. It was all only on the left side at this time as well. I met with my PCP and he was convinced it was chrohns disease. I felt defeated. A few days later it hurt so bad at work I said screw it and went to the ER. They did a cat scan of my organs and saw inflammation in my small intestine. So I went back to the GI and did the pill cam. Results came back normal again.

PCP still convinced it was chrons but also thought it might be my spine so I went and had MRI's with/without contrast of my brain, neck, and spine. There was some "stuff" with the lower spine but no trapped nerves they said.

At this point the pain had started happening on the right side as well. My PCP was still convinced I had chrohns and the GI was wrong. All labs and diagnostics said I was a very healthy individual except this pain. So I went to a pain clinic. It took two months before I got injections because they had to cancel the day before my injections and it was holiday time. I went and saw my PCP in this time and he did a test and said it was my abdominal wall he believed.

Then, three weeks ago I had my first injections, they were two nerve blocks lateral to my naval and some other injections for pain all over. After I left I had no pain. This lasted a week. My pain killer consumption was only for the first few days due to sore injections and after that no pills. The second week it slowly came back until it was fully back. During this time I started taking 1 pill a day. After 3 weeks, I was back to two a day. (I take 50 mg tramadol twice a day, among a long list of others) It also increased and started to linger much longer. It would feel like the weird feeling you get after someone punches you in the stomach. Plus burning, stabbing, throbbing pain. When I think I have a handle on it, it moves. But it has stayed in the same area for some time now. Essentially if you cup your hand around the naval, you touch most of the pain areas.

The called the mayo clinic and they said they could do nothing for me. I found this doctor forum below and today I asked if they used ultrasound on my injections. I was told "no that costs extra and most insurances don't cover it. We do use like an x ray thing but most of the doctors are so god they don't need that."

Today they told me they will try the injections a second time and to change to an alkali diet. I am not a fan of psuedo-science so the alkali diet thing pissed me off but to be honest, I am open to anything and have tried everything they suggest.

forums(dot) studentdoctor(dot)net/threads/abdominal-wall-pain.894846/

Do any of you know any doctors who specialize in abdominal wall pain?

I emailed the RN with the mayo clinical study about abdominal wall pain. At my injections appointment I am going to ask why they don't use ultrasound and if they don't, I will try to find a doctor who knows more about abdominal wall pain.

It is interesting about the shoes. I have felt like this might be the result of a posture thing. I also always catch myself yawning because I am always holding my breath and flexing my muscles. This is what my body does. I have been trying to make that not happen as much to see if that helps.

Sorry it would not let me post links cause I'm new. But those are important to my post.

@dschaefer

Had you had any abdominal surgery before this pain started? Any bowel issues? I don't really understand the problem with ultrasound. It seems that if it might produce a diagnosis, it shouldn't be a problem. Just curious. I do hope that you find answers soon.

Jim