MickeyLou

I began experiencing chronic pain while on active duty in the U.S. Navy. I had just finished a stressful eight-month deployment onboard an aircraft carrier, as a newlywed, followed by two shorter trips on destroyers. Upon returning, I took a physical fitness test and could not finish the run due to sciatic-type pain. A few weeks later, I started to experience severe scalp psoriasis. I took some muscle relaxers and kept on stressing, as we were in the process of transferring from Hawaii to Florida. At my new duty station in Florida, I was on shore duty and the job was not terribly stressful, but my perfectionist and “good-ist” personality enabled my pain to increase in severity, moving around and morphing in strange ways.

The Navy doctors could not make heads or tails of this, and I was labeled with fibromyalgia and sent to the pain management clinic. I ended up retiring, since I had enough time in and I was no longer able pass my PT test (graded sit-ups/push-ups/run that did not trouble me at all the first 18 years of my career). I continued work as a civilian (desk job) and eventually I had a lumber fusion (L5-S1) and cervical fusion C5-C7). Even after that I got to a point where I could not sit at my desk all day. I am now on disability, unable to work.

I retired in 2010, and stopped working altogether in 2016. After that, my urinary, pelvic, and gastrointestinal symptoms struck. I also began to have trouble with pain in my hands and feet. A big reason I quit working was a whole-body nerve pain I was having every night—it felt like fire ants in my veins, and I swear I didn’t sleep for years (until I would drop from exhaustion). In 2023, at a family reunion, a cousin of mine educated me about TMS, and she sent me the books The Way Out and The Divided Mind. I read these, started using Curable, and found a Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) therapist who has helped me tremendously! The first symptoms to subside have been the “fire ant” pain and insomnia. I am on the road to recovery!