Living with Chronic Pain

Hi, I’m new here so I thought I would share my story.I’m 30 years old, and I’ve lived with chronic pain for the past 13 years.When I was about 15 or 16, I had fallen off a roof and broke a chair with my stomach.It wasn’t until a year later that I started feeling a small cramp in my right side,didn’t think much of it at the time,but within a couple months it escalated to chronic stabing pain that would drop me to my knees.For the next 2 and a half years after that it was every other night in the ER getting morphine shots,”Which drove the Doctors crazy”, and during this time I had all the routine tests done, MRI’s,CTscans,upper/lower GI,ultra sounds,colonoscopy,nerve blocks,ect, finally after all these tests came back normal, and nothing seemed to help other than a morhine shot, which would only help for so long.Anyways,the Docs wanted to give me a referal to Stanford to have further testing done, but at this point the insurance company was fed up with me, and wanted a psych evaluation,”both writen and verbal”,which I passed,and the Docs again requested a referal for Stanford.The insurance company still said no,I was at my witts end, and so were the Docs.My dad had called the insurance company to tell them how severe my problem is, the lady said “I’m not supose to tell you this, but if you can get one of the primary care Doctors at Stanford to take him as a paitent then you won’t need a referal from us”. So that finally opend the door to Stanford, we went up there, they addmited me in, “this was now 1997 2 and a half years later”, they had the pain clinic team come down to my room.When I told them about the fall off the roof, they said they know what it is, they said it was “nerve damage”.They gave me a 75mg shot of litocane into my IV, then asked how I felt, it was better than a morphine shot.So they put me on a dripline of that for the next 3 days,along with periotic morphine shots.Anyways , they discharge me and send me home with mexilitine and neurontin,which is supose to be the sort of substitute for the litocane treatment.That didn’t work, all it did was make me feel drunk/dizzy.So basically from the point of leaving Stanford I treated my pain with as many pain killers I could get prescribed to me,that’s how it was for the next 2 years.

Then in 99, the Docs wanted me to try spinal chord stimulation, which I did for 3 weeks,didn’t help,infact it would rather set off the nerves and make my pain increase.So from 1999 -2002 I used norco/vicodin to help eliviate some of my pain.In the year 2000, I filed for SSI dissability, I was approved,which means I got medi-cal insurance.After about 3 and a half years, Social Security wanted a re-evaluation/re-diagnosis of my pain”2004″.So I went to the Doc they told me to follow up with, and she just did a standard evaluation,”poke & prod”, no new tests/treatments, nothing.So SSI denied me because they only have a vage diagnosis of “nerve damage” from Stanford back in 97.So now I’m stuck again, I need a diagnosis to further recieve SSI/insurance, but I can’t get a diagnosis or treatment without insurance.Anyways, I ended up having to call an ambulance last night, the Docs did another CTscan, “which really suprized me”,but it didn’t show anything out of the ordanary,which is good in the sense that I’m not dying right now,but the problem is that I am “dying” in pain. Anyways, that’s a short version of my story, thanks for reading it, any comments or thoughts would be much appreciated.