Back To The Future part 1

Back Story pt1

Have you ever had pain so bad it made you want to rip your muscles out and be done with them? At its worst, that was my situation. Over the course of 11 years my back was front and centre of my life, and sometimes the chronic pain I was experiencing felt unbearable... although I am still alive now, so in hindsight I must have been able to bear it after all!

It was an incredible moment for me when the pain dissapeared, just as quickly as it had appeared all those years ago.

In the time before I first felt the searing pain, I seemed to be a physically fit and healthy gardener who had just turned 30. Then I woke up one morning and could barely move because the sensation was so overpowering. Days turned to weeks, the doctor ordered tests, weeks became months, the tests finally showed what I believed to be an open and shut case - I had degenerative arthritis in my spine and this was causing me pain. Doc said putting pressure on my spine would result in a quicker degeneration, and strongly recommended I stopped gardening and other physically stressing pursuits.

Well, that was that then, I thought to myself, I'd better be really careful from now on. I left my gardening job and looked for work that wouldn't damage my back. It was the tail end of the recession, days turned to weeks, and then many stressful months went past before I finally secured a new job.

Every morning I would be in so much pain that I would have to do an hour of gentle stretching before the tension had eased off enough to get on with the day. In the beginning I tried painkillers of varying strengths, but they made me sick, so we parted ways soon enough. I would do other things to manage my pain too, such as meditation, mindfulness, breathing exercises, yoga, diets, and other attempts to get some respite... sometimes it worked (temporarily), sometimes it didn't. This was my daily pattern for the next eleven years... and then something amazing happened.

For a week, as well as my back problem, I was getting excruciating pain up and down one leg, and then it would switch to the other. I was struggling, unable to sleep or to concentrate on simple tasks, and in my desperation I decided to Google my symptoms. It was my good fortune to click on a link that would change the rest of my life!

The website was a tribute to the teaching of the late Dr Sarno, who had been Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine, New York University School of Medicine, and attending physician at the Howard A. Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, New York University Medical Center. He'd had the realisation part-way through his career that he was misdiagnosing many of his patients and sending them to unneccessary surgery... something which, according to his findings, that doctors are still doing to this day decades later! He had the good grace and humility to change his approach, and has since helped many many many people to recover from chronic pain without the need for surgery or painkillers.

Dr Sarno found that many people had chronic pain that wasn't caused by physical illness, even though they may have degeneration of sorts, but by an over-active stress response where significant danger was mistakenly perceived to be present. It's a bit more complicated than that, I'm simplifying it down for the sake of the length of this blog, but what was important to me at the time was the question 'could that be what's going on with me?'. Dr Sarno had identified that if the pain was moving around the body, got weaker and stronger, was impacted by stress, then it may be possible that the pain could be resolved. In fact, he had seen patients who after understanding this, had resolved their pain extremely quickly. I thought to myself, this could be me, I wonder if I'll wake up tomorrow and the pain has gone.

Is it going too far to call it a miracle? It certainly felt miraculous waking up the next morning, the first time in eleven years, without any pain in my body! I was ecstatic, (but also aprehensive, I didn't want to jinx it, I still had a bit of residual fear there to resolve). The next instruction I followed was to disengage from any activities that reinforced the idea that the pain was structural... so no more strectching in the morning, at least whilst I had the two things connected in my mind. I felt free, and immediately found a football group to have a regular kick about with. I increased the gardening (I had still been doing light gardening work as I love it so much) to the level I used to, and didn't worry about lifting 'properly' any more - I just picked things up. I felt born anew and just so lucky to have had those leg pains that inadvertently led me to finding Dr Sarno's work.

And now, a good few years on, I'm excited to report I remain pain free. Which is to tell a slight lie... every now and then I get struck by pain, and I use Dr Sarno's technique to move past it. For example, not long ago, whilst lying in bed, I was thinking about a particularly stressful decision I needed to make about what to say in a high-stakes meeting the next day. I decided on what to say and immediately I felt sharp cutting pain in my ribcage, everything in my body tensed up, I struggled to breathe, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, it was excruciating... then I remembered Dr Sarno and realised what had happened, my fear system had kicked in, something in me saw a real threat in the decision I had made. I talked to that part of me, saying it's ok, I'm safe, I'm in the room, there's no immediate threat... and within seconds the pain went, just like that!

There is more to how pain arises, how it is processed, and how it disapears, and there's more to my story. Check out the second part to this blog to find out more...

https://magnificentpeople.co.uk/back-to-the-future-part-2