It's been a really long time since I have posted on here. Looking back at this journal, it was a journey of self-exploration, self-understanding, perseverance, and times of great joy and pride. But looking back, it was also a long journey permeated by pain, frustration, injury. It wasn't until after PT school and almost two years into my career that I began to put together the pieces of everything I had gone through in the past ten years and was able to connect it in a way that opened my eyes and gave me the first sense of direction I had had in quite awhile.
Changing careers and dropping everything to pursue a career in healthcare TOOK. BALLS. I have to give myself that. Sometimes I look back at everything I accomplished in 5 years (and it was a LOT) and I try to give myself credit. But while I am so proud of what I was able to accomplish during that time, and have ZERO regrets (I absolutely love what I do and come home every day tired, but so fulfilled knowing that I am making a difference in people's lives)... I often wonder, at what cost?
5 years of school, stress, uncertainty, debt, panic at times - I felt like it destroyed my body. This strong person that I had had become suddenly felt like a shell of a human. I was in a fog. I hurt all the time. I battled constant pain and insomnia.
But today - I have a light at the tunnel. I have been using intermittent fasting (16:8, but more on that later) and suddenly I realized that I truly WAS walking around like a zombie. Between this new diet plan and continuous PT with an integrative physical therapist, I feel like a new person.
My story is below.
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10 years ago, I woke up in pain. What seemingly occurred overnight, I suddenly had inexplicable abdominal pain with no identifiable cause. I could hardly eat anything, and certain foods I had eaten all of my life, like dairy, suddenly made me very ill. What followed was over 10 years of banging my head against the wall trying to get someone to listen to me, trying to find an answer, a solution - anything. 10 years of elimination diets (that while some were conclusive, like dairy and quinoa, and wheat to some extent, most were not). 10 years of over $10,000 in medical expenses, including a barium swallow study, 3 upper endoscopies, 1 colonoscopy, several abdominopelvic ultrasounds, a HIDA scan, a gastric emptying test, and more blood work panels than I can possibly remember. 10 years of countless nights of insomnia, sleeping upright propped by pillows, starting and ending my day with severe abdominal pain, random bouts of nausea and vomiting, and repeated orthopedic injuries that I swear would happen with something as simple as a sneeze (chronic, debilitating trigger points in my neck, repeated rib subluxations, sternal “tenting” and pain, muscle strain after muscle strain...) 10 years of comments like, “you’re just stressed” and “maybe you would just feel better if you ate some meat.”
I was starting to lose hope. The symptoms I was experiencing were very real. But time after time, my scans and my blood work showed that nothing was wrong. I was put on different medications, given a throwaway diagnosis of IBS and Functional Dyspepsia, but nothing seemed to get better. I pulled myself off of the meds, including an antidepressant that was supposed to calm my stomach pain, but only made me foggy and sleepy.
Last summer, something changed. I was having what I called a “flare” - common in winter and summer, and I realized that as my abdominal pain came and went throughout the day (often after eating), so did my back pain. It was the first time I had ever experienced (that I was consciously aware of) referred somatic pain, and realized that I needed help - this was bigger than I knew how to handle on my own. I had learned about referred pain in the body during PT school, but so much of our curriculum looked at “mechanical problems” that it didn’t even occur to me that that was what was happening to me. It was then that I started seeing a physical therapist trained in visceral and neural mobilization who pointed out that my internal organs (most notably my small intestine and the neurovasculature around my hepatic system) and surrounding connective tissue were adhered together from years and years of inflammation. A physical therapist who reproduced the mystery abdominal pain we had been chasing for 10 years by pressing on my intestines neighboring my right hip. These adhesions were harboring bacteria, impeding digestion, tissue perfusion, joint mobility, and sending pain signals throughout my body. These adhesions were causing some severe problems, but were subtle enough that they would never appear on any imaging. And as the body is super connected, my brain wasn’t processing these signals very well and I ended up with an overactive “fight or flight” response in my body. As a result, my body was playing tug of war trying to free itself, all while trying to “protect” my organs, which ultimately led to musculoskeletal problems.
All of these years I had been looking for a simple answer to the problem, when the answer was, it wasn’t just one problem, but a huge list of problems that had become vastly interwoven together. Most of what I was experiencing was nerve pain, and pain associated by backed up pressure systems in the body. What I thought was stomach pain and heartburn was actually overstimulation of the nerves surrounding it. After 10 years, I felt validated and I just cried.
It wasn’t all in my head. It wasn’t all in my head that when I had stomach pain, the pain in my neck, hips, and back were also worse. And these injuries weren’t occurring because of something I was or wasn’t doing - the problem was so intrinsically layered upon itself internally that I didn’t stand a chance.
Of course, in order for things to get better, they had to get worse. Apparently all of these adhesions were holding me together, so the minute we started trying to clear them up, I started experiencing a slew of orthopedic issues, the biggest one being that my pelvis and lumbar spine started repeatedly tilting and rotating out of place, and because of the huge amount of dural tension I had developed in my spinal cord, any amount of extension would put me off my feet for days. I quit my job at the hospital in a panic because the thought of lifting someone had me TERRIFIED. I stopped exercising because I was suddenly afraid to move. My body was literally telling me to STOP. I hated this. I was depressed. It was interfering with every aspect of my life.
I was just starting to make some progress with PT, when in March, I got very sick. False negative COVID or not (I’ll never know until we can truly trust an antibodies test), my lungs and ribs were so affected by this that I am STILL working through the aftermath. The last thing I needed was more inflammation surrounding my heart, lungs, and diaphragm - and coughing led to yet more rib subluxations (this time - ALL of them, and repeatedly). And of course, this had a tremendous impact on my neck and low back alignment, and now, the icing on the cake, has led to some inner ear problems (again: the body is so complexly interconnected). It’s been a rough few months, but I am still hopeful that there is going to be an end to all of this.
Why this all started will forever be a mystery. We have a working theory that this all started with a few bouts of whiplash from car accidents 15-20 years ago, leading to rotation of my internal organs, impacting all of the surrounding nerves. But 10 years ago? Who knows. Perhaps it was a virus, food poisoning, an autoimmune reaction to quinoa, a response to an antibiotic. I may never know. But years of trying to figure it out just led to more and more inflammation that just compounded itself in my body and created a huge mess.
I have a long road to recovery, but for the first time I am hopeful and see a light at the tunnel. I still have some really hard days. I am desperately trying to return to all of the activities that once made me feel so good, and some days, I am just truly defeated. But then I go to PT, and my mind is blown but yet another crazy connection in the human body, and by understanding my pain, I can finally work through it. Veronika Campbell, words cannot describe how thankful I am for you. Thank you so much for everything you have done for me, and everything you will still do in the future.
The moral to the story?
Don’t ever take no for an answer when you believe in your heart that there is a solution.
Be your best patient advocate, listen to your body and find someone who will listen with you.
#GetPT1st
