@anniebrook Good afternoon and dare I say Happy New Year. In this case, I am glad you are able to elucidate your feelings or what we might call lack thereof. Sometimes when the pain is so bad, it just takes control and as a person, you disintegrate, you feel numb, you just want to crawl into a corner. Interaction with others, social discourse, even a smile. is sometimes just way too much to handle. After about 15 years of succumbing to pain, I made the move to medicinal cannabis. I had a "coach" and the acknowledgment of my professional caregivers as I began the journey into integrative medicine. It has taken about 3 years and I am now in control of the medication that provides a big boost to my quality of life. I have had some help from a traditional medication, nortriptyline, to get me over the suicidal thoughts and overwhelming depression I felt at the beginning. I now find joy in every day, and in every new adventure, in spite of the pain. It is still there, that pain, and it still prevents participation in the things I used to do. Yet, I am doing something, every day, to be able to say that my day included moments of love, laughter, and joy. Be safe, be mindful and find just one reason to be joyful. That's a beginning.

@anniebrook Hello, Anne. I am glad you are able to express your feelings because many years ago I was numb to my feelings. While I was in a hospital for a 30-day Rehab treatment of an eating disorder, I told a doctor that I had no opinion and did not feel anything. I was ordered with paper and pen into a private room and told not to come out until I wrote at least one page about how it feels to feel nothing. I was amazed that I wrote pages about nothing else. It felt like knives slashing my heart, like loneliness, sadness, fear, and much more. It led me to realize that I did have feelings but they were depressed. That was the beginning of my ability to overcome obstacles.

I do not want this message to be all about me because I am concerned about you. However, I would like to share some of the health conditions I have endured during my lifetime and to this day. I am also in chronic pain for nearly five decades. It began with anxiety and depression as a child during 11 years of abuse. The anxiety caused me to clench and grind my teeth (bruxism) which at now 65, has destroyed my teeth, resulting in chronic dental infections, pain and loss of teeth. I developed migraines at age 19 and fibromyalgia at age 24. Because I didn’t com into a personal relationship with God until I was 27, I attempted suicide three times prior to that. Since that day, I have had the peace of knowing God is with me in the midst of all this pain, and I would never do such a thing again although I must admit I’ve thought heaven would be a far better place to be that enduring so much suffering. So I look forward to being with my Lord but do not dwell on it. At age 40, I developed osteoarthritis and degenerative disk disease as well as peripheral neuropathy. Neurogenic bladder at the same time causes painful bladder spasms multiple times a day. Arachnoiditis ( inflammation of the central membrane enveloping the spinal cord caused by too many invasions by nerve blocks, discographies, steroid injections, myelograms and two spinal surgeries) in my fifties cause burning pain and muscle cramps, as well as worsening bladder and bowel control. Although not painful, tardive akthenesia causes me to constantly shift feet when standing and I had to overcome the embarrassment from people staring at me in public. Nearly 50 years of medications have destroyed my gastrointestinal system and I have had many tests, procedures and surgeries including a stomach wrap/fundoplication (they wrapped my stomach around my esophagus). I continue to have problems with this in spite of treatment.

Severe insomnia has affected me all my life I believe is the result of the fear of going to sleep at night as a child because of what would happen. By the age of 62, under the care of multiple specialists, I had to wear a helmet and stay in a wheelchair because I passed out multiple times a day from extreme 50 and insomnia. For two years and I hit my head so many times from passing out that I truly thought I would not survive to the end of 2016. Finally, my doctor sent me to the Mayo Clinic for the second time in my life, first in 1980.

In 2017, I completed seven months of pre-testing, confirming more than 30 diseases/conditions. I was diagnosed with central sensitization syndrome (CSS) and recommended for the Mayo Clinic’s Pain Rehab Center (PRC). May I suggest you look into this program. It did not eliminate my pain because all of it is chronic and degenerative. However, it did change and improve my quality of life. It is an intense program, but I had tried everything over the years and nothing brought any lasting relief. I tried every narcotic and finally told my pain management doctor a few years ago to wean me off the dilaudid in my pain pump because it did not help relieve my pain but made me foggy, sleepy and dizzy.

In PRC, I literally learned to re-train my brain to function in spite of pain. Sometimes the pain from overlapping conditions feels like it will kill me,. Then I do something to distract me. The more one thinks or talks about their pain, the more intense it becomes. Our brain says, “Yeah, you think THAT hurts? Watch this! And bam, the pain increases.

The PRC helped me put my wheelchair and helmet in storage, and I can walk with a walker now. My life is full and I feel joy in spite of my circumstances. I have an active social life and started a faith-based ministry last year to help other women overcome sexual abuse. May I suggest that you get out of the house and socialize every day. To begin, you may want to just walk to your mailbox and say hello to a neighbor. It’s a first step. Isolation deepens our depression which, in turn, intensifies our pain. If I make a commitment to meet a friend for cof, I keep it even if my pain is on the rise It is a vicious circle we have to break to have some quality of life. I had to fight with all within me and with zprayer to accept my poor health and choose to live.

PRC is an out-patient 120-hour Program. They have had more than a 99% success rate with over 2,000 patients in 20+ years of teaching patients how to re-train their brain to overcome chronic pain. After your initial orientation and induction into the program, you’re not allowed to discuss your pain with other patients in the program. No one knows what the other patients are in there for except that they all have CSS it has made life unbearable because it increases your pain. They wean me off some medications and I feel overall greatly improved.

Depending on whether you live closer to Rochester MN or Jacksonville, FL. you can call the Mayo Clinic and ask to speak with someone in the Pain Rehab Center. God bless you, Anne. Please don’t give up. There is help out there, and I will pray for you.

Peggy

Hello anniebrook - do NOT give up! I went through the same type of thing with one of my hips for years. 3 more “minor” hip surgeries did not solve my problems and I couldn’t do much with my teenage kids (like walk, for one). It was really, really tough and there were certainly times when I didn’t see the point. Things that helped: therapy (greatest thing I ever did for myself), total hip replacement (took 5 years to find someone who would do it), and now a decent pain doctor who supports the fact that I want to take as little medication as possible (chronic pain now has been diagnosed as 1/2 dozen different things, the latest being unspecified arthritis). I can tell you that it took a long time, but my therapist told me over and over to get through one day at a time, and now I live a happy and fairly active life. I would not have believed it was possible if someone had told me 10 years ago that life would be great again, but here I am!!!!