Starting quite young, pain has been close companion of mine.
When I was about 7 years old, I realized that my legs hurt a lot when I ran around. I was openly tortured by my classmates by that age already, so when I started complaining about it to my teachers during PhysEd, they wrote it off as a kid trying to get out of it. I think I was about 9 when I met with a very smart doctor, I think this name was Vandervesthusen or something like that. He was from Austria, if I remember correctly. His accent reminded me very much of another, much more famous Austrian. But he told me I had Osgood-Schlatter disease. It's a painful affliction that is disturbingly common in young children spanning 9-16, most say. It screws with your tendons just below your knee and can really make it uncomfortable to bend the knee at all. It's fairly easy to treat, with relaxation, ice, and anti-inflammatory meds. Always, in sufferers, it's suggested that a modified form of physical activity come about. But my all-knowing teachers, thinking they knew better than my doctor, pretty much all decided that I was lying about it to get the doctor to write me the note. And thus made me participate anyways. So here's the thing about this disease. If not treated, and ignored, the tendons get worse, pull on the leg, and cause the knee to grind. This often results in fractures in the bones. Over the years, I incurred many of these, unknowingly. The damage has haunted me the rest of my life, making it hard to walk in bad weather (It's like a bad case of Arthritis in my knees).
I can't stress this enough. If your kids are complaining about pain every day, and are going from highly active to not wanting to do what they used to love, because of that pain. Please, PLEASE, don't write them off as getting lazy and force them to go back out there. Get them looked at, a few x-rays could save them a life time of anguish. Don't ignore your kids when they complain of pain. Sure, they might be faking it to get attention. But all it takes is ignoring it that one time they don't.
I can offer a great tip that worked for my mom "Does it hurt bad enough that you want to go to the hospital?" I quite often answered no and went back to bed. But there were a few times where I didn't even have to think about it and said yes. And I thank the gods that she listened and took me, because those were some bad days.
But that's not where my problems end. Because of the damage done, It became very hard for me to keep active, I can't even ride a bike without it causing pain in those joints now. I gained weight when I started getting into my double digits, and the weight added to the problem, and the teachers pushed me harder. So I grew to hate physical activity with a passion. I tried to find ways to keep active without pounding on my legs, but there aren't many alternatives for a kid in a household with not a whole lot of money to throw around. And it went downhill.
Then I got out of school, graduated, went about my life. Had a hard time finding work. Tough for a kid who's a little bigger and can't do a lot of stooping/lifting/carrying/climbing to find an honest job. Ended up getting into retail. Probably a mistake, my 30 year old self says now. But I had experiences in life, and my temperment and passion led me that way. Maybe some day I'll tell the story that got me solidified into that field. But anyways, when I was 26, my back popped... and not in the good way. I blew a disc right down at the bottom of my spine. Now, looking back, I should have just gone to the hospital, gotten it looked at, and did it right. But EVERYONE was like, "You don't want to do that they'll want to do surgery and it'll ruin your life! For the love of god find another WAY! Go to a Chiropractor, they'll fix you up" So I did. And it cost me a lot of money. I had to go twice a week to start. I went until I could get back to work, then I went less often, once a week, every other week. Until I was working and not actually limping all the time. He had me stretching all the time, I did them while I was at work. Stopped paying him to (literally) pull on my leg. And a year later it popped again. and again a year after that. I had enough, I saw a real doctor. He said the damage was bad, and I was inclined to agree. He sent me in for CT scans and it was bad enough that he wanted me to go see a Neurosurgeon. 2 months later, I got to see him. This was back in December, and he put my name on the list to get in to be cut on. Turns out the damage from continuing to live my life with the blown disc caused other reactions, bits of bone growing in my spine, pressing on my nerves, causing pain in my legs that I wasn't really paying a lot of attention to at the time for reasons that I would hope are obvious to you by now, at this point I had been living in quite a bit of pain for 20 years... what's more, right?
Well now, I'm waiting for surgery, I just quit my last "Standing Job" in favour of a "sit-down job" in hopes that I can survive the worsening pain long enough to get to the OR... I can't sleep... the pain is getting so bad... I have to get up in 4 1/2 hours for day 3 of training in my new job, manning a phone, in a cubicle. If I sleep on my side, I get pain in my legs... if I sleep on my stomach, I get pain in my back... if I sleep on my back, I stop breathing and wake up. I quite often cry in the shower after I get up for work. I don't feel rested, I still hurt, I can barely stand... I'm losing my mind and I want to die.
I don't know how much longer I can live like this. |
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