Chornic back pain almost took my life, it made me lose myself as a person, I lost a job, my health, was continually contemplating killing myself, I lost the sight that there might be feelings left on this planet for me to feel again other than pain, apathy and depression. And yet I am here, almost fully recovered sharing my story with the hope of helping someone who’s out there suffering like me in silenece because all the words in the world would fall short to everyone except fellow sufferers.
I had my first episode four years ago in 2017. Back then, it used to be relatively harmless, just a minor annoyance. I was still doing HIIT training, working 9 -5 and had a more or less “regular” life. First forward to July 2021, I was having trouble walking 20 minutes at a stretch. Sometimes I would wake up the middle of the night because of the pain, sometimes it would be really hard to fall asleep because I would be so uncomfortable with the constant buzzing of the pain. I had multiple sore vertebrae in lower and mid back, constant pain radiating down the back of left leg and muscular pain on both sides in upper back.
The hardest part of it all was how difficult it was to find the motivation to do anything which quickly turned into a full blown depression. Getting out of bed was hard. Cancelling every plan at the very last minute to the utter dismay of people. I was alone by myself in a big city like Toronto and I knew that I needed to socialize, but I just couldn’t. I didn’t have the energy, the motivation or more importantly hope that I could ever get myself out of this.
Then in November 2021, I ended up in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. How someone like me who was having trouble getting out of bed ended up in another country is a story for another time. During my fourth or fifth day in that beautiful city, it suddenly struck me that I have been walking for hours at a time and virtually without any pain. I wondered if there was any legitimacy to this whole “mind body” thing that I was hearing a lot about on the internet. Some time before out of my desparate search for a solution I signed up for an app called Curable. I am the kind of person who would sign up for apps and online bootcamps and never follow through so that didn’t go anywhere, but I did remember that they are trying to attack the chronic pain problem with the mind body approach. In the app there was a section called “Ask a therapist” where I found an episode by “How can I tell if my brain is causing my pain?” by Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv. I am a huge believer ofAlan’s work and will add all the relevant links at the end of the article. One thing that they mentioned that really stuck out to me was if the pain keeps shifitng positions or change in intensity without any discernible “organic” cause then it’s probably “neuroplastic” in nature. Here I was, in a different city walking 10 – 12 times the amount that would ordinarily cause me agonizing pain, huh, very interesting! This led to devouring of podcasts and recovery stories from people like Dr. John Strachs, Dr. Howard Schubiner and a few other renowned names in the mind body arena.
Even though I could intuitively sense that my pain could be neuroplastic in nature, my conscious mind still wrestled with the idea. Alan mentioned the rapid progress he made with his clients like people “recovering” from decades after being in pain. I remember being super skeptical and wondering in what sense he was using the word “Recovery”. Is it that people were experiencing some temporary relief during the session? Or is it that the pain was gone forever? Is it fair to create false hope in people who have suffered for years without quantifiable evidence? As someone who felt let down by the medical system, I even felt a sense of anger. But then part of me was well approaches with “quantifiable evidence” haven’t been working for me either, so I might as well keep an open mind.