Back In Charge: How I Healed from Chronic Pain

By Elizabeth Reilly

There is hope, there is a way of healing and there is a pain-free life to be enjoyed and celebrated.

In the summer of 2005 Elizabeth Reilly sustained an injury from a seemingly trivial accident, after which she had chronic pain for the next fourteen years. Treatments of one sort or another – both mainstream and complementary – gave only temporary relief. Exercises, as prescribed by physiotherapists, made little difference. Hours spent trawling the internet gave no satisfactory answers, nor did doctors whose specialisation was pain management. Frustration and despair set in.

It was only after she stumbled quite by chance on the work of Dr John Sarno that understanding of her symptoms began to make sense. This discovery, along with research into the work of other practitioners in the field of mind-body medicine, enabled Elizabeth to embark on a healing journey that transformed her life. In this engaging and human story, she relates, with insight and humour, her progress, her steps forwards and backwards, and her eventual restoration to full health.

This is a story to inspire, with many pointers for readers who might also be suffering from chronic pain or other unexplained symptoms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Apr 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781805148081

Elizabeth Reilly

Elizabeth Reilly studied at the Royal Academy of Music. She taught class music and piano in London and the home counties for over thirty years. After retiring from full-time work, she lived for seventeen years in Gloucestershire, where she started to write, before moving to Oxfordshire in 2021. She has a grown-up daughter and son.

Book preview

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Copyright © 2024 Elizabeth Reilly

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Troubador Publishing Ltd

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Harrison Road, Market Harborough

Leicestershire LE16 7UL

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Web: www.troubador.co.uk

ISBN 9781805148081

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

For my friends in Curable Groups with gratitude and love, and to the memory of Dr John Sarno

Contents

Introduction

1Body

2Sarno

3SIRPA

4Curable

5Lockdown

6Moving

7Groups

8Healing

9Living

References

Introduction

In the summer of 2005 I sustained an injury from a seemingly trivial accident, after which I had chronic pain for the next fourteen years. I spent a good deal of time, energy and money during those years having treatments of one sort or another, scouring the internet and looking for answers as to what was wrong with me. I hadn’t even known there was such a thing as ‘chronic pain’ until one of the many physiotherapists I saw attached this label to me, and I felt unbelievably frustrated that no-one – not even doctors who specialised in pain – could tell me what the matter was. Underneath this frustration was anxiety – although it was a long-time before I could articulate it – a fear that I would be in pain for the rest of my life as well as a dread that I was suffering from something really bizarre that medical professionals had missed.

Then, when I’d more or less given up and resigned myself to my fate, I got my answers quite by chance. They were completely unexpected, but I knew instantly that they were right, and I started to pursue a new path. This is a personal story, but I would like to think readers might find some pointers towards understanding their own pain or other unexplained symptoms. There is hope, there is a way of healing from long-term pain, and there is a pain-free life to be enjoyed and celebrated.

1

Body

‘It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.’

– Tom Stoppard: Arcadia

Of course, I could have no conception of the drama that was about to unfold, as my husband, Ed, and I, chatting happily, approached a stile beside a padlocked gate on our evening walk. It was the end of a hot summer’s day and a lovely time for walking in the cooler air, turning occasionally to look at the Malvern Hills behind us, glorious in the evening light. I climbed onto the tread of the stile and then put my right leg over the top onto the tread the other side. As I was transferring my weight, the whole structure wobbled then fell away to the left, and my right foot skidded off, shearing away to the ground on the far side, leaving me doing the splits across the fence. Somehow I extricated myself from this bizarre position and Ed, who’d witnessed it all, came carefully over to join me. I said that nothing was hurting and so we continued with our walk – at least another mile – until we reached home.

The next morning, I woke up and couldn’t walk. I didn’t know it then, but my life – at the age of fifty-five – had changed forever.

It felt particularly cruel as we’d only lived in Gloucestershire for seven months, having spent almost two years searching for our ideal retirement location, with beautiful walking country high on the list of our must-haves. We had settled well into our new environment enjoying, among other things, some wonderful walks with the Ramblers. I had started a private piano teaching practice which was growing and thriving. And two weeks before my accident, my brothers and I had moved our ninety-one-year-old mother from East Sussex into a nearby care home. Despite the stress of moving her, I knew she was now being well cared for, I was visiting almost daily, and the one big worry that I’d brought to Gloucestershire with me seemed to have been solved. I didn’t think I had a care in the world.

Yet here I was now, with severe pain in my groin, which persisted despite many sessions of physio, dozens of exercises, ice and heat applied several times a day, and painkillers taken, it seemed, by the handful. After about a fortnight pain also came on in my lower back, where it stayed for the next fourteen years, on and off. When occasional bouts of sciatica began also to occur, my GP added amitriptyline to my large doses of ibuprofen.

Physio having not helped much, I moved on to chiropractic, during which it was discovered that my pelvis was severely misaligned. I felt considerably better after treatments to reposition my sacroiliac joints (SIJs) and the pubic symphysis joint at the front of the pelvis. Also, the sciatica went and never came back. After the first series I continued to have chiropractic treatments from time to time for several years. Always I felt better after them, but the pain-free times never lasted.

A year after the accident, almost to the day, I was given steroid injections into my hip by a pain consultant at Cheltenham General Hospital, for what he termed ‘irritable hip.’ After the procedure he waggled my hip about and then told me with a wink that I should carry on walking and ‘climb over lots of stiles!’ So I did. A few weeks later he repeated the procedure in my right SI joint, after which we went to Cornwall and walked five miles on the coast path. Oh, what joy!

But now I could no longer sit or get comfortable in almost any position. My whole body, it seemed, had seized up, as if it was in a kind of internal straitjacket. I learned about trigger points and how I could massage them with a rubber ball. I tried this and covered myself in bruises. I continued working on my gluteal muscles, which often felt super tight, massaging them with the ball against the bathroom wall. I felt relief for a short while, but it never lasted very long.

Professional massage treatment helped a bit, but it was when I discovered Rolfing that my connective tissue – fascia – was stretched and ‘unglued.’ It was a hell of a treatment to receive but I felt wonderful afterwards – light and free. It didn’t cure my back pain, but it did ease many of my symptoms for quite a while.

Another year on, medical acupuncture for trigger points – the last thing on the pain clinic’s list – not having worked, I was sent to a Pain Management programme. I learned skills and strategies for living with pain and undoubtedly found it useful, especially the message about pacing activities, which I practised, and continue to practise to this day. But I was no nearer to an understanding of what was wrong with my body, and what seemed so strange was that my pain moved around and changed from day to day, even sometimes from hour to hour. Nobody knew what was wrong with me, and nobody could give me answers – indeed the health service had given up trying to find answers, telling me I should ‘live with it’ and ‘manage’ it. This felt very defeatist and I was sure there must be a cure out there somewhere. My pain mattered – I mattered –and I intended to go on searching.

Another glimmer of hope came when my chiropractor sent me to a new physio who told me I needed to retrain my gluteal muscles, which had ‘switched off’ after my accident. I had to squeeze one buttock ‘cheek’, then the other, then both together. Blink, wink, wink, she said, smiling. I did these exercises and found them very difficult – I really did have gluteal amnesia, common she said in people who’d sustained a pelvic injury like mine. I practised them hard – never mind pelvic floor exercises at traffic lights, I was doing ‘blink, wink, wink’ in supermarket queues. The strength in these muscles slowly improved and I stopped massaging my bum with a ball. But my glutes could still sometimes tighten painfully for no apparent reason, and my lower-back pain remained ever present.

In 2008, after another dismal period in which I couldn’t walk for groin pain, I saw yet another physio who specialised in backs, who was sure it was my back and not my groin itself that was the cause of the pain. After many sessions with her and loads more exercises, based this time on the Sarah Key method, I did feel some improvement. This was further improved by my latest discovery – myofascial release – for which I travelled to Birmingham, an eighty-mile round trip. This treatment made me feel wonderful and I was able to have an almost pain-free foreign holiday, my first for years, in Austria. I was even able to walk well in the Alps above Zell-am-See and Mayrhofen, after we’d spent a week seeing the sights in Vienna