This is the story of a pain patient (me) who has been tortured every day for 15 years. I created this site years ago to help me think more clearly (my brain on pain just doesn’t work), and to present complex information to doctors. I was somewhat surprised that no doctor would ever look at them but I shouldn’t have been. That was before I realized how broken our medical system (including most doctors) is, especially when it comes to treating chronic pain. If you have chronic pain yourself, you know what I mean. If you don’t, you probably have no idea. You probably still trust doctors to treat whatever pain you might have. I hope that continues for you. For those of us who battle pain daily, we are also in a battle with our medical system, one that has no problem with your suicide, as long as you don’t ask for medication. Everyone knows the US is in a “war on drugs”. What some people don’t know is that this war extends to pain patients as well. Just my luck. In the early days of my pain, 2010, at least I could get an appropriate dose of methadone, the one medication we’ve found to be incredibly effective at keeping my pain under control. However because of drug abuse, our government has decided that pain patients should not be treated with the only medication that really works, opiates. They send letters to doctors warning them that they will show up to their offices any day, cancelling every appointment and turning their office upside down to make sure they are only using opiates according to their guidelines. Most doctors I’ve talked to said they’ve simply stopped prescribing opiates. To me, that means they have blood on their hands. Isn’t this a violation of the hippocratic oath? I always want to ask them how many of their patients have committed suicide but I don’t think they know. Those patients just stop showing up.
When I was young I thought I was invincible. I was an extreme sports athlete, no make that an extreme sports addict, shaping my life around the activities that made me happy and sane. Windsurfing was my favorite, then surfing, snowboarding, mountain biking, and anything else I could risk my life on. I thought I would either die or worst case scenario, be sidelined for a few months while I healed. Little did I know, there was an outcome far worse than death awaiting me – torture. It is so hard to communicate to others how much pain you are in. For me, it doesn’t show on my face (I’ve learned to mask it), it can’t be measured and it doesn’t show up on a scan (at least it’s not obvious on a scan). So when you tell someone, including doctors, that you are in horrific pain and would prefer death to daily torture of life, they either don’t believe you or they gaslight you with labels like “depressed” or “addict”. They certainly won’t take your word for it and prescribe opiates, often the only appropriate treatment. I can’t tell you how many doctors have walked into the exam room with that look on their face that tells me I am the last person they want to deal with. If they are willing to deal with me, I typically get about 5 minutes to explain a 15 year story. Any paperwork I bring (test results, scans, etc) are usually dismissed with the wave of a hand and five minutes into my story, they interrupt with their particular schtick. Sometimes it’s magnets, or laser or PRP or prolotherapy, maybe nerve ablations. I’ve found that they rarely respond with an appropriate diagnostic or treatment plan. They’ve seen my chart which has things in large font at the top that tells them I’ve gone undiagnosed for years and no one can figure out what’s wrong with me. As an engineer with an IQ of 140, I love a challenge. Not so with most doctors. I get it, it’s really not their fault. It’s the system who only gives them 15 minutes/patient. They don’t have time for challenges and unless there is a clear diagnosis on a test result or image, they just don’t have time for me. They didn’t start out that way. Years of dealing with the system and whining patients has worn them down. In the end though, it falls on their shoulders to try to reduce suffering and it’s the patient who never gets the care they need, creating the idea that the patient has already received appropriate care or at least a valid attempt at diagnosis. I can tell you that this rarely happens. If your pain isn’t diagnosed quickly, it probably never will be. If you don’t get your pain under control quickly, it might turn into a pain syndrome that you have to live with the rest of your life.
One of the best quotes I ever heard from a doctor was actually from a Stanford med student in training who said “pain begets pain”. This is widely recognized. The problem is, with the DEA breathing down their back, doctors are now condemning patients to a lifetime of misery , bad health and ultimately suicide. Granted, not every case calls for opioids. It’s just that determining which cases should be treated with them are difficult to discern. It takes time they don’t have. I will try to recognize when I’m being negative towards doctors and steer away from that. I’ve said my peace. If you are a pain patient you already know it and if you are a doctor, you probably don’t want to hear it. You have your own complaints about patients, primary that they whine about their doctors. The whole thing is surreal to me and it has caused me to lose faith in our medical system, our country and even my fellow human beings. Humans just don’t deal with pain very well.
My Story
As I said, I was an extreme sports idiot until I developed pain just left of my thoracic spine. It started out as a tightness or muscle guarding and would escalate rapidly into pain. I had a few crashes around this time so maybe I tore a muscle or damaged a joint. Did you know there are 72 joints in the thoracic spine? It was first diagnosed as Facet Joint Syndrome but after a few injections and a radiofrequency rhizotomy (nerve ablation) that I jumped at prematurely out of desperation. To this day I don’t know if the ablation worked. I do know that it damaged many perfectly healthy nerves, creating new problems. Best case is that those only mask the pain for a year or two so I ended up with more pain and unclear results. The next series of doctors turned their attention to the costovertebral/costotransverse joints. I had many diagnostic injections but I kept trying to do the sports I was addicted to so I have them little chance of working. It seems that regardless of which joint they were testing, the entire area would go numb for a few hours, supposedly indicating a positive result but if they included steroids, there was no longer-lasting relief.
I’ll jump ahead to this year when I diagnosed myself with Slipping Rib Syndrome. I can pull my ninth ribs out of socket in the front, where the rib connects to cartilage which eventually connects to the sternum. I wound up in West Virginia for surgery by the “expert of experts” in this condition, Dr. Adam Hansen. I am now 7 weeks post-op and I’m thinking I made another big mistake, like the rhizotomy, again, out of desperation. In September of 2025 I had Costal Margin Reconstruction surgery which consists of cutting the cartilaginous rib tips into sections and using them as spacers between the 8th, 9th and 10th ribs, stitching everything together and then plating the structure with a biodegradable plate that breaks apart 6 months to a year later. What they didn’t tell me was that I would need to live like I’d had open heart surgery for four months, doing nothing but walking when not in bed or sitting down. Apparently the plate breaks easily and for everything I asked if I could do, he had a story of someone breaking their plate which is something you really don’t want to do. This, for an active person is difficult, especially when you feel like the surgery only made things worse, not better. You have to be mentally strong because it can take anywhere from 2 to 12 months to know if the surgery actually worked or just created a new set of problems. He didn’t do much to assure me that I would ever get my life back, regardless of whether it worked or not. He said I could live a “normal” life but when I mentioned the sports I do, he advised that I stop them all. Perhaps this was more a commentary on my age and common sense because he also said something about my new structure of scar tissue and cartilage tips turned to bone, being 85% as strong as the original at some point (a year I believe). He also has a 30% failure rate (seems high) so I think he’ll say anything to keep you from breaking your plate the first four months. Another problem with this surgery is that for the first few months, it is common to go through stages where you think it didn’t work. I tend to overthink things and catastrophize so it’s been quite an emotional rollercoaster. The recovery is admittedly “brutal” but the worry that you’ve gone through all this extra pain and trouble, only to make the original pain worse, is terrifying. I guess more time will tell.
The trick for me is staying positive, especially when the pain level rises to level 9, which it does daily. I used to fear death because I loved my life. Now I know there are worse things than death. The torture we see on TV is a constant reality for thousands of people. I think about it every day. At 65 after 15 years of horrific, unbearable pain, I often think I’ve had enough. My quality of life is incredibly negative and I’m not sure what to do about it. I need to stop thinking about it for a few more months but that’s easier said than done. Pain is all I can think or talk about. Next time you have Level 8 or 9 pain, see how well your brain works. I once read a quote, “pain is selfish”. I have found this to be tragically true. I’ve lost everything to this pain, including my friends, my job and the joy that I used to get out of life. My wife is still with me only because she’s amazing but our relationship has suffered tremendously and is now more of a caretaker relationship. They say suicide is taking the easy way out. Believe me when I say that nothing about suicide is easy. If I ever do get to that point I know it will be very difficult to carry out successfully. In my opinion, if our medical system won’t prescribe appropriate medication to people who are suffering, it should offer euthanasia. Instead the unsaid medical advice is, “there’s always suicide”. Is suicide from chronic pain even suicide? I think a more accurate term is self-euthanasia. If they aren’t going to prescribe medication to end suffering, they should offer this alternative. I believe pain patients have a right to pain medication. Anyone who has had severe chronic pain believes this. The problem is, if you haven’t had it yourself, you have no idea what we’re going through.
For years, this website has been about Slipping Rib Syndrome and I’ll go back to spreading the word if the surgery I had for it works. However at this time, I am very skeptical. While I’m waiting to find out, I’ll go back to using it as a space to explore other possibilities. This can get very confusing quickly. I think I’ll start by dividing the pain into two possibilities, local or referred. If the pain is local, the joints and muscle at LT10/11 are the prime suspects. If it’s referred, which I think most mid back pain is, it could be referring from anywhere. This is where more research is called for on my part. It is a common belief that nerve compression or entrapment anywhere along an intercostal nerve, can and does refer to the back. That is one of the core theories of Slipping Rib Syndrome, that irritation of nerves anywhere in the thoracic region radiates to the back. Exactly how is up for debate. Another theory of Slipping Rib Syndrome is that the two joints at the proximal end of the rib, where it connects to the spine, the costotransverse and costovertebral joints, are irritated by hypermobility of the rib. This would make the pain local. The floating ribs (12th, 11th and sometimes 10th) are not closed loops. They connect only to the spine and their distal end “floats”. My 10th ribs are actually floating which you’d think is unusual except that it turns out, is more common than we were taught, in fact it may be the norm. Both of my ninth ribs sublux. I can use the Hooking Maneuver to create very disturbing sounds (that surprisingly, doctors cringe at), kinda like a knuckle cracking but much louder. Apparently this is not so rare either and even Dr. Hansen tests positive for Slipping Ribs using the Hooking Maneuver. The million dollar question is, does the hooking maneuver require the reproduction of your pain to be considered a positive test for the syndrome? I.E. Can you have slipped or slipping ribs and not have Slipping Rib Syndrome? After all, my right side is almost as broken as my left and I have no pain on the right. Unfortunately I’m coming to the frightening realization that my left side is asymptomatic as well, at least when it comes to SRS. This puts us back at square one. So if that was a red herring, what’s the next primary suspect?
I’d say it is …
1. Rectus Abdominis Trigger Points
Around the year 2000, I blew a hole right through the middle of my left ab muscle. It took me years to convince doctors of this, even though it was easy to push my intestine back through the hole. When I finally convinced a surgeon to go in, they found the hernia and because it was fairly simple at the time, the surgeon didn’t use mesh, he simply stitched up the hole. He said to wait a few months and then I could resume my normal activities. Maybe he didn’t understand what “normal” was to me because after waiting the recommended time, I moved to the Columbia River Gorge for extreme windsurfing. I’m pretty sure I blew the stitches out right away. It took seven more years for an active hernia to turn into pain (still just a theory). In 2010, when I developed back and flank pain, an abdominal hernia that we assumed was still fixed, was readily dismissed (and still is by most MDs). Other practitioners know that the front core muscles work with the back core muscles so the possible connection is not as readily dismissed. In fact, as trigger point experts know, rectus abdominis trigger points at the top of the muscle (where I have a knot and lots of pain) commonly refer to the mid-back.
This is my Occam’s Razor theory. All of my pain is on my left side. I was a fool to think they weren’t connected but every MD I saw scoffed at the idea. Hey, if it wasn’t in their training, it doesn’t exist. I saw a trigger point specialist who showed me how to self-treat my abdominal trigger points and fascia. I should have gone back to him instead of getting this surgery.
2. Facet Joint Syndrome
Back in the mid-nineties, I was playing volleyball and hyperextended my spine. This caused a pain similar to my current pain but not as severe, that would linger for years. It finally went away but perhaps it’s an old injury come back to haunt me in my old age. Or maybe it was caused by something else. It was, after all, my first diagnosis and what I go the ablation for. Just because the ablation was botched shouldn’t have led to this diagnosis being so readily discarded. This is why I need a PET-CT. I participated in a study involving imaging for pain with a well-respected Stanford radiologist, Dr. Biswal. His scan used FTC, not FDG but he swore the two radiotracers produced similar results. The PET scan showed high reuptake of the lower thoracic vertebral marrow and the costotransverse/costovertebral joints at levels T7 through T12. He was convinced this was one of my major “pain generators”. However, because the scan was “experimental”, it is once again, readily dismissed by MDs. Moving forward, I need to get a real PET scan and possibly more CT and/or MRIs. Radiology is another area that I need to better understand. It’s too bad we can’t make appointments with radiologists.
3. Muscle Spasm/Guarding
The knife in my back could be muscle guarding. Like trigger points, effective treatments are muscle relaxers and physical relaxation. I carry a lot of stress in my body and it would make sense that this tension is how it all started. This might be more of a symptom than a cause. While the knife hasn’t moved much in 15 years, the nerves in my back muscles have become very sensitive over the years. In the early years, a massage felt great. Now, light palpation can put me in horrible pain for days, weeks or months. The pain seems cumulative in that the more I do, the more it hurts and it takes a lot of rest to settle things down. My pain is also delayed. I can go out and do just about anything without too much pain but I pay for it the following two to three days. This is another area that I need to research, the delayed aspect of the pain.
For now, I’m just trying to get through the next two months without breaking my new biodegradable rib plate that is holding my “basket weave” (Hansen 3.0) together until scar tissue forms. I won’t go into how dark things have seemed lately. Let’s just say I’ve been thinking a lot about ending the fight that has been my life (“your fight is over” is a quote from a series I’ve been binging on called “The 100”. It was created from a book by Kass Morgan, a post-apocalyptic science-fiction writer who seems unusually adept at chronic pain with lines such as “you have no idea what it’s like to be in pain every day”. There are 100s of episodes and it has been very timely if not disturbing. Whenever someone dies, a fellow warrior cuts their braid, reciting the words “Your fight is over”. After what I’ve been through these past 15 years, I look forward to that day.
Note: Many of the menu items take you to pages about Slipping Rib Syndrome. That’s because they were created after the diagnosis but before I had the surgery for SRS in 2025. I will work on this website as time permits. It’s a mess right now. Thanks for reading this newer front page!