Living with Chronic Pain

My story starts thirty years ago when I was siteen years old. I was a vey active kid from an early age and water skiied and rode off road motorcycles. when I was sixteen I bought a CZ Jawa 400cc desert racing bike that was insanely fast. I was riding it one day and the throttle stuck in third gear which translated to 70 mph. The bike had no kill switch for the engine and I ended up losing it and flipping end for end at 70mph injuring my back and generally beating myself up pretty good. I fixd the bike and rode it home and my mother drove me to the hospital where they x-rayed me then prescribed muscle relaxers and pain killers. I eventually healed up for the most part but had to have my back adjusted frequently and had problems with muscle spasms on a regular basis. the next year I reinjured my back replacing the head gaskets on my car and once again was on pain killers and relaxers and getting my spine adjusted.

This ended being a pattern for me where I would go for a while with just mild problems then bouts of pain and muscle spasms and the drugs to make it better. Then I joined the National Guard and on week-end while doing a squad patrol exercise at the coast we came under a simulated attack and while ducking for cover I fell down the face of a dune and into a hole. I was under a full combat poad with a full alice pack, ammunition and weapon and the fall broke the aluminum pack frame and injured my neck. I was evacuated to the local hospital where they again took x-rays and gave me pain killers and muscle relaxers and put me in a neck imobilizer.

A few days later the hospital called me and asked me to come in for more x-rays. They told me that the first x-ray showed that I may have a fractured vertibrate and said that they needed to do more x-rays to make sure. It turned out that it wasn’t fractured but it took a long time to recover this time and I was only in my early twenty’s. I had more and more problems as time went on then when I was twenty-three I was working at a plywood mill down on the log pond feeding logs into a large elevator tray that lifted the logs up to the log deck to be debarked. I had a log float uner the tray and I sent a full tray of ten foot logs up and stuck my pike pole into the stray log and was pulling it back when a log popped out of the tray.

It landed on my pike pole which was resting on my shoulder as I was pulling on it. I was dropped like a rock and the next thing I knew I was on my but on the walk over the logs wondering why my pike pole looked like a pretzel. I was in shock and didn’t really feel it for a few days but I progressivly got to the point where I couldn’t straighten my back and was stooped over and in extreme pain. I was off work for three weeks and on light duty for three months. I never really completely recovered from that injury and had many set backs over the year following.

I was in and out of the doctor’s office getting my spine adjusted and getting the muscle relaxers and pain killers. Each time it would take longer to heal and each time it would heal less and leave more residual pain that I learned to live with. Finally when I was thiry-six I was working on my sports car rebuilding the suspension when I was trying to break loose a lower a-arm bolt that was siezed. I was on my knees under the fenderwell with a breaker bar withan extension on the handle. I was pulling up on the handle when i realized that I lifted the front end of the car off the jack stands, I was lining the car back up to let it back down when I felt a terrible pain in my lower back. I had tears come to my eyes and lost my breath but was able to drop the car onto the stands so that I wasn’t crushed under the car all I can say is that miricals do happen. I was in excruciating pain but I kept thinking that it would get better because it always had before but a month and a half later I crawled into the doctor’s office.

He took one x-ray and sent me straight to the hospital for an MRI they sent me straight to the orthopedic surgeon and I was in surgery the next morning at 5:00am getting L5-S1 replaced with BAK implants. I had completely destroyed the disc and had gone a month and a half with L5-S1 bone to bone. I pretty much shredded the sciatic nerves and condemned myself to a life of extreme nerve pain down my legs.

Eleven moths later I was back in surgery to have C5-C6 fused with a peice of bone from my right hip and luckily I had it done as soon as I had problems with it so that surgery actually helped reduce the pain I was having from the damagd disc. In the last ten years the pain has progressively gotten worse and worse to the point that I have been precribed morphine and percocet to try to control it for the last seven years. I am up to 90mg of morphine daily with two percocet a day for break through pain and that does not relieve the pain completely and at times I am still awake for days at a time beccause the pain is so bad.

I had a lumbar MRI last summer that showed L1-L2 is bulged, L2-L3 is bulged L4-L5 is bulged, I have impinged sciatic nerves, arthritis at L-5 and massive scar tissue that is causing problems as well. I am going in for an MRI on my Cervicle and Thorasic spine this week and I am scared out of my mind at what they are going to find. I have been fighting for my social security disability insurance now for the last thirty-four months and am looking at another year at least before getting my benefits. The one thing that I have learned is that there is nothing social or secure about social security and they will do anything to avoid paying out benefits including the Administrative Law Judge saying that my doctors prognosis is not credible and telling me to go back to work even though it is illegal for me to work while on morphine in the state of Oregon. Most importantly if you have back pain go to the doctor right away, do not wait like I did or you may end up like me.