Living With Pain

Lots of people live with pain for a variety of reasons.  When your doctors can't figure out why you are in pain it's even worse.  Right before my plantar fasciatis got bad I went to my doctor complaining about lower abdominal pain severe enough to finally come in.  This was last June.  She sent me to a gastroenterologist who proceeded to perform numerous tests and found nothing.  He sent me to my gynecologist who looked at all my tests and she said,  you're post menopausal so it's not gynecological.  Lose weight.  Well, yeah I want to lose weight  but I was more interested finding out why I was in pain, by then it had been months.  Good news, you don't have cancer, but we don't know what's wrong with you.  I left depressed and  angry with her attitude.  At this point I decided to go back to my primary care physician and asked her to look globally at my pain and  lack of other  symptoms and see if she could look beyond what the specialists had looked at.  My pain is very close to the surface when palpated.  She thought about it and decided to send me to a woman who specializes in woman's urology  at Stony Brook Hospital.  It took several months to get an appointment with her but it turned out that she actually had a diagnosis and a treatment. She sees lots of women with this problem.  That was in December.  She was wonderful, one of those doctors who actually listen and pay attention to what you are saying.  I don't know that there is a medical name but she said that I have what's known as pelvic pain and  mine is muscular.  There are several other causes.

But, getting treatment turned out not to be so easy.  The two very specialized physical therapists she refers  did not take my insurance.  I could only find someone who could do external pt and the low dose valium I was taking  which was  working turned out to turn me into a zombie.  I couldn't focus and couldn't stay awake in the evening and had trouble waking up.  I didn't feel safe driving so I stopped taking it and called the office.  She prescribed  a larger dose to be taken internally once a day.  I won't go into details, but the generic form wouldn't dissolve.  The insurance company wouldn't pay for the brand name which does dissolve.  $100 for a drug that's been around for how long?  I am still waiting for their decision on whether they will  cover it.  Oh, and by the way during this we changed insurance companies and the recommended therapist takes the new insurance.   So for the last 2 weeks I've been finally doing the therapy my doctor recommended.  It's painful and exhausting and time consuming especially since the office is 30 minutes away.  Hopefully it will also work.

I decided to write about this because there must be other women who have the same problem and haven't found a diagnosis either.   My physical therapist said that her boss is working with a doctor doing research on this.  It's not rare, but the doctors I went to weren't aware of it.  There are medical centers where all your doctors are in one place and actually talk to each other.  If that had been my experience I doubt it would have taken 6 months to get a diagnosis.