People with chronic pain deserve better than saying there is nothing wrong

I stayed in the back of the Panic Conference Hall that I was going blind. I had had sensitivity to bright light for a few weeks. Then, the night before the conference, my symptoms worsened; The hotel room did not have a pale enough lamp to calm my orbs suffering. That morning, I was in so much embarrassment that I hid in the back of the hall wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, like a celebrity hidden from paparazzi – and I wasn’t even the main speaker.

Did I have a glaucoma crisis? Endopthalmitis, a potentially threatening infection for deep eyesight in the eyes of the eye? A retinal vein thrombosis?

In a state of alarm, I arranged an urgent ophthalmology meeting.

The ophthalmologist pushed a pressure sensor against the surface of my eye, seeking signs of glaucoma. He slipped small pieces of paper under my lower eyelids, trying for dry eyes, which are tears without tears, like an oil -free motor. He tested my central vision as well as vision in my periphery. Standing two inch from my face, he shone a bright light in my eyes, studying my retina as diligent as a preschool looking for Waldo. Then he sat again and strictly summarized his diagnosis: “There is nothing wrong with your eyes.”

My ophthalmologist had plunged me into a diagnostic void, in a world with nothing clinical. It is nothing that many people with chronic pain are absorbed when their symptoms oppose the simple explanation.

As a doctor and scientist, I do not believe in such a diagnostic nihilism. Maybe that’s why, when the ophthalmologist said my eyes were fine, I did not suffer despair (“No one knows what doesn’t go with me”) or anger (“How dares he is not in pain!”) . On the contrary, my mind asked for further explanations. I knew something had to cause my symptoms. At the time I left the OPHThalmology parking garage, I even had a new theory.

Before this ophthalmology appointment, I thought of any pain I had experienced that it was caused by damage to the periphery of my body. I had often caused damage to that periphery, a series of athletic injuries, making my body function as a complete employment act for orthopedic surgeons. I had back operations in the late twenties for an extended disk. This was followed by surgical procedures on the right wrist, right shoulder, ankle, left foot, right shoulder (again), left foot, right foot (again), left hip and pelvis . For all those injuries, I spent at least three to six months in physical therapy trying to remove the surgery and another three to six months recovering from the mentioned procedure. This is a lot of time in a lot of pain in many parts of my body. Throughout that time, I continued the theory that I did not suffer from chronic pain. I was just experiencing decades of acute pain.

My wrong theory was strengthened by my fast recovery record by each of these acute injuries. The pain that radiated beneath my right foot left immediately after a surgeon removed part of a disk in my lower back. Both of my ankle operations restored the normal range of movement, allowing me to run without feeling as if my knot was filled with glass pieces. Shoulder and wrist surgery enabled me to return to tennis courts with painless pain (and, however, with pain underestimating) upper stroke.

And then, my recovery power failed me. A routine hip procedure interrupted a fusion at the front of my pelvis, the pubic symphysis. It is usually not a very reliable union, with each half of the pelvis that rises or falls only one millimeter or two after humans shift their weight from one foot to another. During pregnancy, the tissue that makes up the symphysis is released, giving the baby’s head a fighting chance to do it through the mother’s pelvis. After the termination, my symphysis was released as if I were in the eleventh month of pregnancy. Whenever I gave birth to one of my feet, gravity would pull the other side of my pelvis toward the ground, the node moving 3 or 4 times more than I should; I felt like my body was falling in half.

For a year, I tightened a narrow velcro strap around my pelvis, hoping the knot would heal. In the meantime, I was in constant pain. In the midst of these pelvic concerns, the symptoms of my eye appeared, an insult raised over my already damaged body. My life was starting to feel like a series of cruel coincidences. And then the ophthalmologist told me there was nothing wrong with my eyes. This is when I came with another diagnosis.

I had experienced so much pain in my life, and so much teasing pain in the months before the symptoms of my eye that the paths of pain in my brain became hypersensitivity.

I will explain this idea in more detail in later posts. But for now, it is enough to say that there are regions in the brain that receive information from other parts of your body (“Hmm, many signals coming from the toe you have just crashed into the bed”), interpret those signals ( “You damage your toe”) and create an emotional response to those signals (“Aargh, it hurts like hell”). Sometimes the brain receives signals of potential damage and calls your pain response (“This feeling in 45^Th The mile of this bike ride is not pain; It’s progress! “)

For chronic suffering of pain like me, the paths of pain in our brains often become extremely active. Under the bright lights, those that can damage our eyesight, the pain paths in our brains need to be thrown inside and make us take action (“Close our eyes, wear a hat, wear sunglasses …”) but in case Tim, moderate light, this had no danger to my eyes, however it led my brain to scream from pain. A good doctor, admitting that my eyes were healthy, should have explained that I needed a treatment that would calm those roads.

If you have chronic pain, your doctors have the right to seek peripheral damage that may make your brain experience pain. But whether they find such damage, they need to identify ways to calm your brain’s reaction to painful stimuli. People with chronic pain deserve better than saying there is nothing wrong with.