Dear Bloggers,
As a seemingly healthy person in my
mid-50s, most people don’t suspect that I am living with chronic
pain. When I tell people about my condition, it feels like many still doubt
that I’m serious or assume I’m exaggerating. But truthfully, like many with
invisible conditions, I’m probably more likely to downplay the severity of my
discomfort on the rare occasion that I do mention it. It’s the kind of thing
that seems to make people uneasy: pain that’s frequent or constant, with no
means to alleviate, even though I always wish the Paracetamol in my medicine
cabinet would magically do the trick.
How things came into my life?
My chronic pain started in my late teens and has been worsening for years. It’s localized most intensely in my joints hands, knees, feet and neck. Along with it are daily pain on some of my ribs and monthly inflammations of bursae. The cause of it all is the weight of my body, working on it, but the progress is not very fast if you cannot work out fully anymore as I ripped a couple of muscles through the years of existence and this is worsening my pain.
Am I the only one?
No, There are many people that are dealing
with chronic pain and many of them know how to hide it from the outside world
and some of them are living right through the pain. Others like me need some
treatment in pain relief and go to a specialist for advice and treatment. In
other words, many millions of people around the world are dealing with
invisible and ongoing pain. I’m far from alone in my experience.
Diagnosis
Arthritis and inflammation is an important
cause of joints pain. I wake up off and on throughout the night with shooting
pain in legs knees and hands, my finger lives a life of their own. Every
morning, my joints and fingers are stiff and painful, sending shockwaves of
pain through from my whole body. In the beginning, I believed that it was all
in my head. Doing dishes or walking for a long distance but also sitting in the
same position can kill my day and make life completely miserable. Some days, I
know as soon as I get out of bed that the combination of feeling sour and pain
means I just won’t be able to sit at my computer and write a blog story on this
day.
A good healthcare provider can help you
find the root cause of the pain while treating it. This is particularly
critical for younger people. Because it’s less common for chronic pain to
appear at a young age, a medical issue can usually be uncovered and providers
don’t want lifelong chronic pain to be the diagnosis if it doesn’t have to be.
Although you have to request for it when you explain that this might save them
a lot of money, it might help. In my case, the healthcare providers were giving
up pretty quickly and diagnosed me with Fibromyalgia and gave me medication
(Diclofenac it stops inflammation and I had it for more than 15 years) to ease
the pain. Nowadays, they tend to be “even more aggressive in looking for the
causes of pain,” prioritizing things like MRIs, CAT scans, and blood work. Well
the source of my pain was visually apparent and was diagnosable by a
Rheumatologist and a physical therapist, the learned me to accept my pain and
live with it without any other medication then Paracetamol. Every case is
different, so go and see your physician and talk things through, as more
elusive causes require tests like those mentioned above.
With older patients, these diagnostic tests are also fairly routine options, particularly if pain is persistent despite treatment or does not have a clear cause. However, there is often some pain to be expected during the normal aging process, so it’s more typical to see older patients with chronic pain issues or for the cause to be clear, such as mine Arthritis.
Causes
"Oftentimes there was physical
trauma, emotional trauma, or chemical trauma that initiated the [pain] process”
for patients.
Other common causes of chronic pain can be: Inflammation, for example caused by arthritis or an
Infection, such as an ear infection and also an illness, such as cancer, muscular
dysfunction like spasm. Chronic repetitive motion like a frozen shoulder or
autoimmune diseases, such as fibromyalgia or rheumatoid arthritis.
However, this list does not cover every
possible origin. There are a massive variety of causes, locations, and
intensities of chronic pain conditions. This can make the nebulous condition
hard to categorize or track.
Treating it
The options for treating or reducing
chronic pain are nearly as vast as the potential causes. This can often delay
relief if the first treatment is ineffective. In my case, I was sent to
physical therapy first and went for many months, but found no relief from this
route other than a confirmation of cause, so I’m now exploring
alternatives. Many physicians hesitate to prescribe opioid painkillers for
chronic pain because of their addictive potential. However, non-opioid
solutions can be effective.
Treatment options for chronic pain
Medication is far from the only
possible solution. Other treatment options for chronic pain are Physical therapy, Acupuncture, Local electrical
stimulation, Brain stimulation, Surgery, Chiropractic treatment in all of these
cases you are the one that decides in the end.
The best cure for my personal situation is
treatment with medication in the long run according to the Rheumatologist we
should wait with it as long as we possibly can. As Meds can do more damage in
some cases. I’ve tried some other pain-alleviating routes in the meantime
(including physical therapy and some Zen course to get my life in balance.) and
have been slowly investigating more options recently (like chiropractic
treatment and acupuncture) but this is for the years to come.
Ultimately, what works for each person may
be one of these things, a combination of several, or something else altogether.
Some people may get some relief from treatments like these, but need surgery or
deeper medical intervention to fix the root condition causing the pain.
For a lot of people, myself included, just
being aware of the range of options for treatment, and the fact that so many
other people are in a similar boat (be it one we can’t see), provides the first
bit of relief.
The Old Sailor,
