Since I was 16 years old, I have had this excruciating pain that feels like it swells my internal organs against my rib cage and my spine making it impossible to lie down, have the strength to sit up or even comfortable to stand up and walk around. When I first started getting it, it would last 4-5 days and would normally turn up at the start of school holidays or the start of school term... almost like it was a change of pace that brought it on. Now, I've noticed that it happens when I'm overly stressed about something and the thing that stressed me has disappeared, which makes it worse, because you want to relax and you just can't because you're in so much pain, but sometimes it just appears out of nowhere.
When I was 16, my doctor recommended me to an infectious diseases specialist - he thought it might be a Vitamin C deficiency, which was weird, as the acid in orange juice used to make it worse. But it was also hard, because you usually had to wait 4-6 weeks to see a specialist, and when I eventually saw him, the pain had disappeared, so he really had no idea what was going on.
After I left home at 18, I would book into see my doctor, but then she would have a wait list of 4-7 days, so again, she couldn't put a finger on it either. So it was paramount, that once it started happening, I needed to see a doctor then and now.
I remember when I was about 24, and it was happening, so my doctor recommended I see a naturopath. For 6 months, I took 8-10 pills a day of different types of natural remedies, but nothing seem to treat what was actually going on, and the aches would still come back.
I cut out coffee in my life just before I became pregnant with my first son, as caffeine seemed to really trigger it off at least every couple of weeks, yet it still seemed to come back, luckily not as frequently as every two weeks.
In my late 20s, I remember having an ultrasound for gall stones, but again, nothing showed up. By then, I had worked out that 2 cups of peppermint tea helped, heat bags, massage and hot showers worked wonders for a temporary fix, yet any type of pain killer did nothing.
By my mid 30s, I had been to an osteopath, had plenty of remedial massages, went to a physiotherapist for about 6 months, even a hypnotherapist and yoga to ease the stress in my life, but nothing seemed to make any difference, besides give me temporary, but not complete relief. I went back to my normal doctor, and after years of research and experience, she thought it might be an overactive rectus abdominal muscle putting pressure on everything. She recommended I go get some dry needling done. And you guessed it, it didn't make a difference.
I even was with a friend who is a doctor when it happened once, and he thought it was a gastric-acid problem and that I essentially needed to stretch out to allow any 'wind' to pass through me to ease the pain... but again, it helped, but it was short lived.
So now, as I've started taking my boys to a chiropractor for their nagging ailments and I'm seeing that there is actually some positive results coming from their concerns, why not see if he can help me. As I had a re-occurence on Saturday night that made it impossible to sleep, I asked him yesterday if he could help me. I still had a dull ache under my ribcage, and he prodded at my spine seeing where he could identify my aches, and he got every one of them. He said it was pretty bad, and after all these years, he told me to get a spinal x-ray done immediately. For the number of times I had told a doctor or someone in the medical profession that it feels like something's putting pressure on my rib cage and spine, why had no one suggested I get a spinal x-ray before? It just seems so obvious, doesn't it?
Anyway, I'm off to the chiropractor to get my back cracked and any other adjustments he sees fit, to hopefully find an answer to what has been going on. I have a bag full of x-rays (I think I had about 8 done), so hopefully he can see something and it's not a figment of my imagination. I think I have been patient, don't you think? ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment