Day 4 Doctors

I have a medical background as a veterinarian. I understand how disease processes work and how structural abnormalities can lead to a host of difficulties. I also understand the progression of disease and warning signs to look for. At the beginning of my pain journey I had the basic diagnostics tests that were all normal and it was a relief, if not a bit confusing since my symptoms were so consistent and severe. The doctors then started to look for more rare reasons for my pain and that's when the fear began to creep in. As my life started to become more and more affected by the pain I began to get the clear message from the doctors that they just did not have any ideas about what was causing my pain and how to help me. Various words were thrown at me such as functional pain and psychosomatic pain. At the time I felt dismissed by the doctors and I struggled to make sense of what they were telling me. The message that they were sending me was that normal bodily functions were causing me intense pain because my nervous system was interpreting these events as painful. Why would my nervous system do something like this? I asked many doctors and their answer always was the same, "We don't know. You should take antidepressants to help with the pain and learn to live with it. It will always be in the background, but the medications can help to dull the sensation." It was the most hopeless thing that I could hear: Accept that you will always be in pain and learn to live with it.

I had a recent flare of my pain that felt different to me. I went to urgent care to get checked out and the doctor told me, "I don't have time to read your chart as it is too long. You have chronic pain and your doctor wants you on antidepressants. You are not taking the medication as she directed and there is nothing we can do for you. You should talk to a therapist that deals with chronic pain. There is an addiction recovery center in town that offers those services."

The truth is, the doctors are not entirely incorrect. My brain is interpreting normal bodily functioning as painful. However, I don't have to accept and anticipate that I will be in pain my entire life. There are reasons why my brain is creating the pain and there are ways that I can retrain my brain and rid myself of the pain that is meant as a distraction. I envision myself without the pain and future doctor visits consisting of educating them with a better solution than the one the gave me.