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eliuri
USA
50 Posts |
 Posted - 02/23/2013 : 16:01:23
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Eight weeks ago I fell down some stairs and landed face forward so that my forehead hit a landing pretty hard. I had not lost consciousness at all. I quickly surmised that I had probably broken a rib or two in my posterior ribcage, since it hurt there agonizingly when I coughed, sneezed or bent my torso. I recalled there is little doctors can do for broken/bruised ribs, other than tell you to put ice on it, take anti-inflamatories, and don’t move much till it heals. So I decided to do just that.
Within a few hours after that fall, I had a brief episode of benign positional vertigo (BPPV) where the room was spinning for about a minute or less if I turned my body a certain way in bed. This had never happened to me before, and it was quite scary. Most would’ve gone to the ER by then. It all normalized pretty quickly, so I chalked it up to the concussion of having hit my head on that step. Unfortunately, I did have a relapse of this a week ago –7 weeks after the injury.
Over the first few weeks following the fall, I seemed to be healing gradually. I was able to get in and out of bed without the agonizing pain that this would have engendered right after that injury. Coughing still hurt, but was nowhere as terrifying as at first. I could bend my back in any direction without pain. There was some pain in the shoulders, which started shifting from right to left. I figured I may have pulled something –maybe in trying to stop my fall-- and that it would either just heal on its own or I’d look into some physical therapy for that if it didn’t.. I thought I was taking lots of anti-inflammatories, but in reality I never took more than 6 a day OTC Aleve (naproxen), and I was slowly decreasing that. I’m now hardly taking any at all.
At first, I was quite scared to go down those steps again. I finally did venture forth a week after the accident--and on my way back home, I heard this weird clicking/snapping sound which I thought was coming from my spine. I hurried home in a panic and tried to reproduce those snapping sounds. I realized they were really coming from the junction of my sternum and the first or second rib. This became a source of terror for me, worse even than the pain. That snapping happens when I move my shoulder a certain way, but it seems to come for the sternum area. It makes me feel permanently "damaged".
I was also getting increasingly concerned about the pain between my shoulder blades which sometimes would shift from the right to left side. It mostly subsides if I lay down, but if I sit at the PC for a long time it would act up badly. It feels more like a bad muscle spasm than any broken bones, but still it can be quite painful until I lay down.
There’s something here which baffles me , and perhaps is a clue. Perhaps someone with knowledge of anatomy could help with this part... After the accident, I found three areas where I could see black and blue. I mention these only because it tells me a bit as to the impact of the fall. There was of course a slight bump on my forehead where my head hit that step, some swelling on my chest, near where I now hear those clicking sounds (when I move a certain way) and some minor contusion of the front of my leg. The significance of this is that it shows that the impact of my landing was mostly on the front of my body. Oddly, I feel no pain in the front—where there was impact to at least three areas-- except a mild tenderness when I press on the sternum. All the pain is now in the shoulder blade area. So although I was facing forward when I slipped, the impact of my fall was not on my back at all. Unless I somehow fell on my back and for some odd reason twisted around so I could hit that landing face forward with a three point impact. It wasn’t that great a height for me to have done all that… Maybe a total of about ten steps. So perhaps my fear that I had injured my spine by this fall can be dismissed?... But why the pain in the shoulder blade area and why does it sometimes shift from left to right .
In hindsight, I recall the following. During the first few weeks, I seemed to be healing slowly but surely in increments. I was totally isolated for a while, not being able to go out. But I figured this will all be over within six weeks or so. When I finally made contact with some people I knew online, there was this chorus of “you better get to the ER or at least find a doctor”. Dire predictions of what might happen to me if I didn’t have it checked out , including various threats of a life of endless pain.. which somehow the proper scans in a hospital would prevent. I suspect that these admonitions being backed by the authority of doctor-friends they had spoken to may have in fact set the foundation for what I had feared all along. That this injury would become a seed for a long protracted TMS. There followed weeks of my obsessive-compulsive googling for things that could cause the sternum clicking/snapping and pain between shoulder blades and of course both got much worse. Things got even more nightmarish when the six week period was up. Supposedly, a rib fracture should be totally healed by six weeks. (I doubt ribs look at the calendar to know when theyre supposed to be all healed) Though the symptoms of the original injury were largely cleared, there were these other scary things I mentioned above..The shoulder blad pain and the snapping sounds. To make matters worse, I had another episode of positional vertigo last week, which I had thought was completely cleared up within a few hours after the fall. I still have some mild vertigo now after that episode last week, but nowhere as dramatic as during a full attack.
Dr Sarno does mention that sites of old injuries can become breeding grounds or focal points for TMS. But he doesn’t address if this happens so soon after a recent injury as well….where it can insidiously morph into TMS once the actual wound has healed.
I guess I could go to an ER and hope they might be willing to deal with aftermath of a two month old accident. I know that is the “protocol” for injuries, and I hadn’t followed it But something tells me they wont give me the reassurance I so desperately want. That this will all heal in time if I calm down the way I was when it first happened.. My fear is that they’ll find something which will stick with me for years, like some herniated disc (I’m on the wrong side of 45) or structural damage to my spine which is somehow being referred to the shoulder blades...or whatever…Words by doctors can be very powerful indeed
In the back of my mind there are two fears. One, that I had injured something very seriously in that fall such as my spine or vertebrae and have a high enough pain tolerance to endure it with little or no analgesia . Another fear, was that I would be developing some sort of chronic pain syndrome. I was reluctant to go to the ER or even to get a referral to an orthopedic surgeon, because of reasons many on this forum would understand. There’s also flashbacks to my wife’s fusion surgery of her cervical spine a few years back due to cancer which had metastasized to her spine. She refused all conventional treatments after that surgery and passed on.
My anxiety level now is at an all-time high with dread, depression and fear of going down the stairs. I’m having my two kids do all the shopping for me, which is pathetic… In the past, all my maladies have in the end turned out to be due to tension, mostly muscular, though oddly never back pain. I overcame most of these when I realized it was stress or tension causing this. I've gotten pretty good at handling this kind of thing. In every case where I consulted doctors for it, it made matters much worse not better. I’ve posted about some of those in the past here on this forum. When I had toughed it out on my own , knowing intuitively what it was and reminding myself that it was my stress doing it, it got better quickly. Unfortunately however, the situation here is a bit different. Here there was a real injury, areal fall. I’m just not sure about the symptoms I’m having now.
How much of this might now be TMS?
Please help me sort this out..
-eliuri
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Edited by - eliuri on 02/23/2013 16:32:15 |
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tennis tom
USA
4749 Posts |
Posted - 02/23/2013 : 18:24:19
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Eluri, see a TMS physician if you can, see the lists in my sig below. I would see a physician to get your bumps checked out. Clicking can be TMS, vertigo can be TMS, but the boiler plate is to get checked out for anything structural.
Armed with TMS knowledge, you should be in a better position to understand your health needs rather then worse. If what a doc recommends doesn't jibe with your TMS knowledge, you don't have to follow what seems like bad advice--get a second opinion and maybe a third until you have the knowledge to make your best medical choice.
I would not take six Aleves daily for long term, I was taking that many for months and it resulted in a duodenal ulcer.
Knowing about TMS should lessen your fears of the medical/industrial complex rather then intensifying them. Ultimately we are in charge of our health care, although it may take some insistence.
G'luck!
tt
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DR. SARNO'S 12 DAILY REMINDERS:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0dKBFwGR0g
TAKE THE HOLMES-RAHE STRESS TEST
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmes_and_Rahe_stress_scale
Some of my favorite excerpts from _THE DIVIDED MIND_ :
http://www.tmshelp.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2605
==================================================
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional." Author Unknown
"Happy People Are Happy Putters." Frank Nobilo, Golf Analyst
"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint." Mark Twain and Balto
"The hot-dog is the noblest of dogs; it feeds the hand that bites it." Dr. Laurence Johnston Peter
"...the human emotional system was not designed to endure the mental rigors of a tennis match." Dr. Allen Fox
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"If it ends with "itis" or "algia" or "syndrome" and doctors can't figure out what causes it, then it might be TMS." Dave the Mod =================================================
TMS PRACTITIONERS:
John Sarno, MD
400 E 34th St, New York, NY 10016
(212) 263-6035
Here's the TMS practitioners list from the TMS Help Forum:
http://www.tmshelp.com/links.htm
Here's a list of TMS practitioners from the TMS Wiki:
http://tmswiki.org/ppd/Find_a_TMS_Doctor_or_Therapist
Here's a map of TMS practitioners from the old Tarpit Yoga site, (click on the map by state for listings).:
http://www.tarpityoga.com/2007_08_01_archive.html |
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eliuri
USA
50 Posts |
Posted - 02/23/2013 : 19:38:10
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Thanks for responding, TT.
Unfortunately, I cannot access those TMS physicians you listed, and Dr Sarno I believe no longer takes on new patients. I don't have a GP as of now. I used to have a good one. She grasped the notion of TMS even though I doubt she ever heard that specific term. She was a true healer. But unfortunately she passed away a few years back. I noticed over the past few years that I was doing better without any doctors at all, since I couldn't access any good ones. My insurance is a very limited one, not allowing me to go from one physician to another
The dread of ER is quite powerful one for me. And it's either there or some neighborhood clinic, which is probably worse. I see all orthopedists list themselves as orthopedic-surgeons which is telling. I'm afraid it might be a choice between toughing it out a bit longer to see how much healing nature provides or the ER ..neither of which seem like such good options. My post here was an attempt to get some rough guess as to the likelihood of there being anything serious going on physically. I realize how tricky this is to do over the internet..
You had misunderstood what I said about the Aleve. I had actually cut it down from a max 6 a day when the pain was at its worst. I hardly take any pain killers since two weeks ago, except when the pain is real bad, and even then, only one. In my post I was using the number of Aleves as a way to convey the level of the pain
-eliuri
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Recent injury and possible TMS: Help sort it out
