Chronic Pain

The thing most people take advantage of is that life can change for the worst within seconds. They walk through life as they own it and nothing can stop them from making their goals. That isn’t the true reality of life though unfortunately. We can’t predict that you will be hospitalized in a week or even at your healthiest point in life. I for one didn’t think that I would be healthy one moment and sick the next. I don’t feel like I was someone who took advantage of the way life works either. I am just a small teenage girl who got the bad end of the stick, unfortunately. It is just one thing after another, after another that seems to want to make life a lot harder to handle than it already is.

I have really bad luck when it comes to my health and every doctor I have been to will say the same thing. I am always the one that the doctors have to sit and think about what is wrong with me in order to figure it out. Sometimes not even then. I have had four surgeries in four years and we can hope that maybe I will be able to go for a year without being sick or in pain. Before I was even out of high school I had both of my knees reconstructed so that I could walk and hopefully not be in pain. You wouldn’t think of someone that young would be having that kind of surgery without any injury or external deformity. Well, I have already excided the expectation of a lot of things.

When you just looked at me you wouldn’t know that I have dealt with chronic pain for seven years. All you would see is a teenage girl that doesn’t feel comfortable in her own skin around other people. That is the problem when people say that they have an illness but it is invisible to the outside world. A bone defect isn’t really noticeable if you aren’t looking for it or someone who has high blood sugar. You can’t see that either. I just happen to fit into this category multiple times for many different issues. I had/have a genetic bone defect known as trochlear dysplasia it is rare to a point, mainly to the point where I don’t have any valley’s for my joints. I might have problems with my elbows in the future but right now we got the knees taken care of. It took my doctor/surgeon three years to come up with a diagnosis that fit my case in order to explain exactly what was going on for sure.

I have gotten to become basically a pro when it comes to surgeries. This year especially, I had two surgeries for two different issues within this one year. I was just getting back to my life as normal from having my last knee surgery when I was diagnosed with pancreatitis. I thought I was just sick and that it would pass like it always does. It didn’t I was hospitalized three days after I got sick because I couldn’t keep anything down. If I would have left it and not gone to the doctor I wouldn’t be here today. I would be dead and there is no other way to put it. It’s just a simple fact of life not a dramatization of the matter. I was dying and no one noticed it, not even one person. When I was in the hospital they were completely confused at why I was even there or why I was even sick in the first place. A skinny 17-year-old, 115 pound girl that is as pale as the bedsheets and unable to eat didn’t fit a whole lot of boxes besides maybe the flu. They took some blood and found out that I had pancreatitis but it still didn’t explain why I had pancreatitis in the first place. I sat in the ER for more than three hours with them running around trying to figure out why I was so sick. They were thinking well maybe because you are a teen most of the time they get it from something viral. Well, that didn’t really fit the boxes either since I wasn’t sick before this whole event occurred. They ended up coming to their last resort of an ultrasound. One wave of the wand later explained everything, I had gallstones. They don’t understand why. All they could say was that I had them and that they wouldn’t be able to explain why I had them besides my lab tests. I am not overweight nor in my thirties or forties. Let’s just say that my surgeon was a little confused about this whole case.

This has been my life since I was little though. I was constantly spraining my wrists and ankles easily to the point I almost couldn’t walk anymore. That happened one after another for quite a few years not thinking much about it. I was an active kid that couldn’t sit still so I was bound to get some bumps and bruises somehow. Then fifth grade happened and it went all downhill more than it already was. I hurt the bottom of my foot somehow and could hardly walk from class to class without being in constant pain. I was calling my mom almost every day from the school telling her that it hurt to walk. The problem was the doctors couldn’t figure out what was happening, so all they did was put me in a boot for a year and a half and hoped it solved the problem. Little did they know I would end up with the same problem in the other foot a few years later. To this day I have pain from that and it never goes away. That was just the start of all of this rocky journey. Then knee surgeries 2015, 2017, and 2019. Now we can include a gallbladder removal to the list of surgeries.

I have just come to the decision that I can complete as much Physical therapy as I want to, but it isn’t going to make a difference in how I live my everyday life. It won’t change the pain that I push through in order to go to school. It won’t ever go away no matter what I do so I might as well just learn to live with it since no one can figure out how to reduce it.

I would just like to say and put out there that you walk by people every day and may not even know what they are going through. You don’t know if they are fighting to even be standing there next to you. You focus on yourself when you should be taking the time to notice other people every once in a while. I know I was put on this earth to help people and that is what I have devoted my life to with my mental health website and even this page. Just take a few moments and ask someone if they are okay. I mean like actually okay if they give the automated response of “oh I’m doing good.” Ask them again to make sure because of that simple answer we could go on with our lives not knowing that we could’ve made someone’s day a little easier. I live with chronic pain every day and I plan to move forward in order to help others. Why don’t you try to simply ask someone if they are doing okay with their day. That is all I ask. Not every illness is visible to the human eye.