Day 1 Begin Writing Your Own Story

Ok. Here is my story. This will be long.

I got married in 2010 when I was 29. In 2011, I was trying to move a heavy recliner, and I felt a pop in my lower back, and I collapsed to the floor in a ton of pain. I rested for a few days, just thinking - oh this is just a regular, I pulled a muscle, situation. After a few days, I started to feel better, and things in my body went back to normal. But, a few months later, I felt a twinge, and my back went out - I couldn't stand up straight or walk normally. Same protocol: I rested for a few days, and slowly my back let go and I could go back to business as usual. But, soon this started to happen more and more frequently: I would feel a twinge, and by the end of the day, I wouldn't be able to walk. It got to where this was happening every month. And that is when the pain began to take over my life.

I spent several years going to doctors, having MRIs (was told I had an annular tear and degenerative disc disease), doing physical therapy, going to chiropractors, acupuncture, and on and on. Nothing helped. I was teaching high school, and I was starting to have trouble standing up in front of the classroom. There were some days were I scooted around all day in my desk chair, including scooting down the halls. Ridiculous. My husband had started a business, and he asked if I wanted to help manage the business and be able to work from home, and I said yes. So, in 2015, I quit my teaching job, because my back wasn't letting me do my work anymore.

Somewhere in here, I started going to an amazing massage therapist, and she was able to help me get to the point that my back wasn't spasming and going out all the time. But, by that point, the pain had shifted from just being acute during these back spasms to being a more general pain that never went away. So, even though my back wasn't going out anymore, I was still in level 6-9 pain all of the time. It had also spread from my lower back to my mid back, and into my neck and shoulders. Back pain was all I thought about and talked about. It dominated my marriage, my friendships, I stopped being able to do a lot of my hobbies. My life was shrinking into a smaller and smaller miserable thing.

In 2017-2018, still trying to get help, I started with a new physical therapist. After working with her for a little while, one day, she said something that changed my life. I had brought in my MRI pictures, and she put them up on the wall and she pointed at them and she said, "There is nothing on these images that explains how much pain you are in." And then she handed me the book "Explain Pain" by David Butler and Lorimer Moseley. The absolutely wild illustrations initially turned me off, but she'd told me to read it, and I did. This was the first time I had ever heard about the brain's ability to create pain sensations in the body - that stressors can cause your brain to flip out and create physical sensations in your body, especially if there are emotions you are pressing down and trying not to feel. I immediately knew this was what was happening to me. In the back of the book were a list of resources, and somehow in here, I stumbled upon the Curable app. I downloaded that app, and started listening to the Curable podcast. Soon after that, I was looking at the Curable board members, and I contacted Dr. John Stracks in Chicago, a member of the Curable board, and asked if he would see me. I had to fly to Chicago for the initial appointment (I live in Georgia), but after that initial appointment, I could meet with him over Zoom. And he was running a group for people with TMS, so I joined this discussion group with 4 other chronic pain sufferers that met weekly. This was the first time in my life I had talked to people like me, and each group discussion focused on a different topic in the TMS world plus some group therapy style discussions where we talked about the emotions we were dealing with. Over the next year or so of these meetings, my symptoms started to get better until one day I was walking around, and I realized I wasn't in any pain. This was an incredible day. I started exercising again, gardening again, and enjoying my life.

But, not super long after this amazing experience of being pain free, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. I think it was the next day after I found this out that my pain came back. The several years were full of stressors, and I was in pain a lot of the time. I tried to go back and practice everything I had learned (at this point, I wasn't in the discussion group anymore). But, to no avail.

One of the things that I struggled with a ton during this time was infertility; my husband and I weren't able to get pregnant. I had a miscarriage, and a total loss of hope that we would ever have children. But, in the fall of 2022, I found out I was pregnant. And, I stayed pregnant. Such a miracle. And during my pregnancy, I was not in a lot of pain - I was really scared that I would be, but I wasn't. I had my sweet daughter in August of 2023. But, since she was born, my pain has intensified and spread into my hips and down my left leg, and into my right arm. I believe it's TMS, but part of me has this fear that something is really wrong with me - like my hormones are off or...who freaking knows. The pain is so bad, it just feels like there is something that must be wrong. But part of me knows, because I have dealt with chronic pain for so long, that this is TMS.

Since my mom's cancer diagnosis and all my other life stressors, I have been inconsistent in working on this. But now that I have a daughter and I want to be able to pick her up and play with her without pain, I am going to start on a concentrated effort again to address the pain I am in. So, this is Day One of my journey back up the conquer-TMS-mountain - one I have climbed before, and one I will be able to climb again.

 

I sure hope I can do this again. I've known about it so long without putting the effort / energy into systematically working on it a second time that I am afraid it won't work for me this second round. But, I'm going to try. Also, I love your profile picture. What the fuck else am I going to do? Might as well give this a shot again. Thank you.