billyp

I have been a very active and athletic person my whole life. I was a professional jockey for 9 years and rode and many well known racetracks. After that career I took up marathon running then ultra running. I've finished 4 Boston Marathons, 3-50 mile endurance races and one 100 miler. I've never been down for long. Always looking for the next challenge. That changed for me when I began to get sudden back pain in my mid back. It started out of nowhere and felt like a nail my spine. It would go away during the day but come back every night while I was sleeping. After about a year and a half of desperate searching and dozens of appointments with every medical professional and witch doctor I could find, I stumbled across a disease called Ankylosing Spondylitis. I met with a Rheumatologist and she did a bucket of tests. Nothing came back positive except for the gene which can be associated with that condition HLA-B27. I accepted the possibility of this diagnosis and began Enbrel injections. At that time I was mentally accepting that this medication would take care of it. I felt somewhat better for a few months. . After a while I started to follow a Facebook page dedicated to AS sufferers. I read posts and learned about conditions and symptoms that I didn't have. This was the worst thing I could have done as I began to have anxiety and great fear about what was going to happen to me. I was literally scared out of my mind. Well, as you might expect the pain came back and was worse than before. I hurt all the time and had such terrible muscle spams in my back that I would pray that the world would just simply end. My head would get foggy and I would be so miserable that I couldn't think, work, enjoy my kids or be happy about my life at all.
Months passed, more accupuncture, chiropractors, surgeons, MRIs, wellness folks, supplements, back braces, massages, heat packs, ice packs, inversion tables, hot yoga, gluten free diet, paleo diet - you get the idea.
My pain has moved around to my pelvis area, my neck, my side in the rib area and also pain in my right eye. I've seen 3 opthamologists for the eye pain because I have been scared to death about possible loss of eye sight or a tumor. Not one of them could find anything wrong. I had a MRI on my brain and all tests came back normal.
I saw my Rheumatologist and she suggested that I try a different biological drug this time Humira. I've been on it for 2 1/2 months with no improvement. My wife bought me a couple of books to read, one of which was Dr Sarnos' Healing Back Pain- Mind Body Connection. It was the best and most encouraging thing I had read in my 4 1/2 year journey thus far. I'm 2 weeks post completion of that book and 2 days into my undertaking of this program. Today I was listening to a meditation CD and went through the exercise- Amazingly my back spasm and eye pain completely left me for about an hour. I was so thrilled with that time of relief.
Looking back on the outset of my pain I had a few stressful events going on all within a 12 month period: A painful divorce, starting my own financial services firm, having my former business partners betray me and try to steal my clients, losing my younger brother to suicide, having my sister who was one of my best friends pull away from me due to her own emotional challenges after his death, worrying about my kids with the divorce, their mother and any number of random drug-addicted boy friends.
Anyhow I am posting this to take my first step toward my new pain free life.
Thanks to all who have given me hope through their experiences and to my wife for her support and to Dr. Sarno for showing me that there is a way.