I've been in Chronic pain since I was 22. I am 27 now. The first time I was injured was in a biking accident. It was late at night on the 4th of July. I was riding my bike home when I flipped over my handle bars trying to avoid glass on the pavement while going about 30 mph. My face slammed into the pavement. I regained consciousness 5 minutes later, stood up, walked my bike home, and went to sleep. I should've gone straight to the hospital, but I had work in the morning and wasn't in the right state of mind because my brain had just gone through a hard reset.
(half an hour after my bike accident)
I walked to work the next morning feeling terrible. It was a groundskeeping job at my university and we were weeding some of the gardens on campus when I started puking my brains out. My boss thought I was hungover and told me to go home. I went to the hospital where they did a CT scan and found nothing wrong. They told me to rest for a couple weeks.
The next two years of my life were odd. I was in severe pain, but I trudged through school. I had a girlfriend and a job in a chemistry lab and was doing decently in my classes. The pain started to worsen as time went on, which affected my sleeping and mood. My brain still wasn't working at full capacity because of my concussion. I was so confused about life.
When I was 24 I got a call from my father. He told me that he needed to talk to me about my brother -- in person. I was living in an apartment about an hour away. I drove home and he told me that he had saved my brothers life who had OD'd on heroin the night before. My brother was in the hospital.
My mind was racing. On the highway to visit my brother the front left tire of my car blew out. I slammed into a concrete median. My car whipped around over 720 degrees and I ended up in a ditch. A car pulled up besides me. It was an ex-coworker of mine, Sam from grounds keeping. "Holy shit that was the craziest thing i've ever seen, are you ok man?".
Next thing I knew I was in the hospital. My face was being sewn up from my windshield lacerating my face. My cervical spine was compressed and I lost control of feeling in my left hand.
I had an ACDF (anterior cervical discectomy and fusion) surgery where they fused two of my spinal vertebrae together with titanium and a piece of hip bone from a cadaver. The feeling was back in my left hand, but my chronic pain was still severe from my accidents. I finished my degree while working in an aerospace lab doing GIS -- mapping satellites and measuring their varying signal strengths at ground level based on the collection points immediate environment. This job was stressful. I worked 60 hours a week to keep up, but was only listing 30 so they wouldn't fire me. My pain levels increased as the stress piled up. I started getting chronic hives all over my body every day. My neck was in the worst pain it had ever been.
January 12th, 2016 my brother passed away of a heroin overdose two doors down from my room. I woke up that morning to the sound of my mom screaming "HE's DEAD!" I was paralyzed. Like a child I sunk down into the corner of my room frozen in shock as the police arrived and escorted me out of my room to be with my mom and dad. It's still hard for me to even write anything more about this, so I wont for now.
Two weeks later, I visited a spinal surgeon who informed me that my spine never fused correctly. The surrounding discs in my neck were degenerating at multiple levels trying to support this mess. Two weeks later I was back under the knife getting the same surgery.
I finished college. My chronic pain continued. I decided I couldn't work at a computer, so here I am walking dogs. I went to another doctor yesterday who told me he thinks that I tore my labrum in the accident and that i'll need surgery.
In the chronic pain community there is a theory that is well known called The Spoon Theory by Christine Miserandina on a blogging website called you don't look sick. I'll post it below. You can't generally see chronic pain and therefore you assume that someone suffering from it should be able to live a "normal life" based on their appearance if you don't know their experience well. The Spoon Theory is about how chronic pain takes away time from your life because of the extra energy that is expended and extra pain that comes afterwards that wastes the time of someone who lives with chronic pain. It details how people with chronic pain basically have less hours in our day than someone who is not suffering, which I have found in my own life. Time for someone with chronic pain is scarce and valuable.
Sometimes i'll find mysfelf just looking at the clock in pain--round--andround-andround-andround.
Christine Miserandina's Spoon theory: https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory
