Who am I?
Hi, my name is Greg Payne. I’m 65 years old and I’ve been in hell for 15 years. Until the age of 50 I was an extreme sports athlete. It was an addiction. I lived to windsurf, snowboard, surf and ride my mountain bike down cliff faces. I crashed a lot and I lived with pain but it never bothered me because I knew it would heal. It always healed … until it didn’t.
In 2010, I was surfing, mountain biking and riding my street bike around San Francisco when I noticed a pain in my left mid-back. It worsened pretty quickly over the next few weeks. It got worse every day until it became unbearable. Worse than any pain I had ever experienced before. You wouldn’t know this to look at me. I’ve learned to “mask” my pain when I’m around others to the point that it’s subconscious. Even with doctors, I can’t seem to express how much pain I’m in. Even I can’t wrap my head around it. To have this much pain every minute of every day for fifteen years? Unimaginable.
15 Years In Hell
It started as a pressure in my mid-back, just left of T10/11, that would rapidly turn to severe stabbing pain that radiates to my left flank. Sometimes it feels like the knife becomes a spear that goes all the way through (extending to the left side of my bifid xiphoid process). It is aggravated by movement and diet and it’s pretty much constant. It ranges from levels 5 to 10 daily. It hovers around 7 most of the time. I’ll be talking about pain syndromes but when you’re averaging level 7 pain chronically, your life has been stolen. The people around you can’t see it. The doctors can’t see it. You can try to tell them that you are in severe pain but anyone you tell hears this all day long (either from other patients or from you) and it’s very difficult to tell them you are in so much pain you want to die. I.E. it’s difficult to communicate that you are in agony.
The pain pattern hasn’t changed much in 15 years. From here on out I’ll refer to it as The Pain, my archenemy. I guess I’ll be trying to document the pattern along with theories as to what is causing and aggravating it. For example, there is a delayed aspect to it. I can do pretty much anything I want without it hurting too bad but it’s like that January day at the gym, I start hurting that evening and the next two days are when the worst pain occurs. Does this imply muscle? Nerves? Pain sensors?
The main thing I want to empathize here is how severe the pain is. I’ve lived with it every day for 15 years and I really can’t take it much longer. I’ve had three surgeries, the most recent has only added to the pain. Trust me, there are things worse than death. You can never really appreciate that unless you’ve been there. I now know that suicide is not the coward’s way out. We have a powerful survival instinct and it is not easy to kill yourself. However sometimes, when a person’s pain is unbearable, suicide is the only way out. Just like a dog who has been run over on the highway, that is alive but suffering, the animal in agony with no hope of getting better, deserves the sweet release of death.
What Got Me Here?
Other than me being a bad person my entire life, I suspect my windsurfing harness. In the 90s the “diaper harness” (a brilliant design that lifted you from your buttocks) was replaced by the much cooler “waist harness”, which puts hundreds of pounds of pressure on your lower ribs. Or maybe it was that bong hit I took at a party where I felt my left ab pop when I tried to hold a ginormous hit in. Or maybe it was having my back walked on by an unqualified masseuse. Perhaps it was that volleyball accident I had in the mid-nineties which had me aching for years in approximately the same location as The Pain. I do know the pain started in 2010, seven years after my first hernia surgery in 2003.
Three Core Surgeries
I had my first surgery in 2003 to repair a left rectus abdominis hernia, another in 2016 to repair damage from the same hernia which probably recurred in 2003. The pain began in 2010, between these two surgeries. My third and most recent surgery was a Costal Margin Reconstruction using the Hansen 3.0 technique, performed by Dr. Adam Hansen himself. Recovery has been difficult. I was pretty much bedridden for four months so that I didn’t break the bioabsorbable plate that was used to attach my 10th floating rib to my slipped 9th and stable 8th ribs. I can’t say for sure yet but I’m pretty sure this last surgery was a huge mistake and only added to my problems.
Two Hernia Surgeries and Other Suspects
I think I popped a hole through my left ab muscle in the early 2000s. It took me a year of more to convince the doctors that I needed surgery. The surgeon was surprised to see a hole through the middle of the muscle and he just stitched it up. I waited the instructed recovery period and moved to the Columbia River Gorge to windsurf. I probably popped those stitches then and my core muscles started to move and reshape. Seven years later, the pain in my mid-back would begin, just a few inches through my body from the hernia. Doctors however, refused to see the connection. Maybe there is no connection but I think there is. There is a concept of pain along a dermatome that can collect at the spine and it’s hard to believe this pain isn’t somehow connected to that hernia.
However there are other suspects..
- GI Issue – alcohol, coffee and spicey foods are aggravators. Could they be the original cause?
- Volleyball Accident – in the early 1990s I overextended my spine back and to the left that hurt for years
- Windsurfing harness – not to mention the number of times I catapulted into the boom with by ribs and spine
What Hurts and Why?
After all these years I still don’t know what hurts. Is it muscle? Nerves? Is it the costovertebral/costotransverse or facet joints? It seems pretty localized. The knife seems to be at the end of the LT10/11 transverse process making the costotransverse joint the primary suspect.
What Now?
I need to keep looking for practitioners (MDs, DOs and others). Finding a good one is like finding a needle in a haystack but I need to keep looking even though they usually just makes things worse and always stress me out. I need to research online. I can’t be that unique.
I’m trying to exercise but everything I do (walking, exercising, etc) or have done to me (massage, acupuncture, etc.) just makes the pain worse. To be honest, I’m nearing the end of my rope.
<< To Be Continued >>