Once I started to do physio at home and took some breaks here and there, I noticed some days of relief and got a little excited. I thought maybe my physiotherapist was right about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel in about 6 months. At this time, I had noticed a pattern and a correlation between my pain and my monthly cycle. I had mentioned this to my chiropractor and he had suggested seeing a Naturopath about it.
I booked an appointment with this woman Naturopath and explained that a week leading up to my cycle, my pain would get heightened. Than during my cycle my pain would shoot through the roof and then a week after my cycle more pain. I would get little blips of less pain for about a week to five days and than it would start all over. She said she had many ideas and too many to add at once and so we would take things slow. I took her tinctures and went on a gluten free diet and had to eat my vegetables cooked, as raw veggies were too hard on my stomach. I also had to cut all dairy and sugars out. It was a tough switch especially since I was such a foodie and really enjoy my food, but I did every recommendation, as my goal was to get my life back. After I had, had my miscarriage I noticed that when it would be around my cycle time, I felt like a volcano was erupting inside of me. I would get big waves of high anxiety feelings that would randomly hit and I felt shaky all over, as well as nausea and bouts of diarrhea. I had tried on numerous occasions to get my family doctor to look into this for me but no matter how hard I pushed, it always got slumped to the side and at one point she shut it down. When I tried to reintroduce gluten, my stomach felt like a brick had been hit with it and so I had to continue to cut that out.
Sciatica is one of the hugest things that I have had to deal with on a regular basis. My back would feel like a crow bar was ripping it in half and then this extremely deep, dull, and sometimes electrofying, throbbing pain that would get stronger and stronger, and felt like it was ringing louder and louder running from my glutes down my leg, and sometimes into my foot. I'd be up all throughout the night, most nights, trying every trick in the book that I was shown from practitioners, even running baths in the middle of the night. I'd often pass out finally from complete exhaustion and find myself waking up on the floor in a physio position or passed out on the couch and waking to my husband getting up in the morning for work. It took a toll on me not only just physically but mentally as well. This kind of suffering took it to a whole other level.
Even after all of my efforts and food switches, I didn't notice huge amounts of change with my cycles and would report back to the Naturopath. I'd always leave her office feeling so pumped up about her ideas, but when I would get home and tell my husband about the appointment there was not a whole lot of new stuff put on the table. I was shown these exercises where you plug one nostril and breathe in deep, and then switch to the other side and exhale. I felt silly doing these but thought she knew so much more than me because she was a doctor of some sorts, right? Eventually, I stopped throwing my money at this Naturopath and my new massage therapist had told me about this other Naturopath that had a more of a hands on approach.
I booked my appointment with this new Naturopath and he was quite the character. He was all about the needles and told me that he would like to do prolotherapy, acupuncture, as well as vitamin shots into my back. He told me that prolotherapy was a very effective treatment but it wasn't one for the faint of heart. He explained that grown men would be screaming and crying out in agony on his table when he did his treatments and told me to look up the treatment on youtube so that I had an understanding on what was to come. I decided that prolotherapy was a direction that I wasn't going to take and asked him about his acupuncture approach. I had done lots of research on it and was okay with the treatment but knew that depending on the person, they could put their own personal spin on it with a lot of new age, spiritual things that I was not wanting to receive. I straight out asked him, "So, when you are doing acupuncture treatments what is going on in your mind as you do your approach? Are you strictly thinking in a scientific way or in a more spiritual way?" He said, "Well, off the record, I am a Spiritual Healer and if you want the spiritual than I can call upon the spiritual realm and bring it to the treatment." That answered my question clearly and I wasn't comfortable with letting him do acupuncture on me. My massage therapist had her own physical issues and mentioned that the vitamin shots put into her ankles were very beneficial for her, so I decided to give that a go. I had brought my husband to the appointment with me, as needles and invasive treatments freak me out and I needed the support. He started with one needle into my back and we made it up to three of them, before I was crying so hard that I could barely catch my breath. I asked him how many more we had to go and he told me, "Oh, we just keep going until the brain shuts off the pain and reprograms." I told him to stop and that was the end of that.
I had another chiropractor appointment and after he did my treatment, my chiropractor told me that there was something going on in my low back but he couldn't put his finger on it. He told me to pass the message on to my massage therapist and get her to focus her efforts there. When my massage appointment came, I told her what the chiropractor had said and after the treatment she told me to meet her upstairs where we would need to have a little chat. I stood at the counter and she said, "Keana, I don't know what's going on in your low back but it's so guarded in there that I can't even massage the tissues. Your body won't let me even work in there. I'm so sorry but I've decided that I'm not comfortable massaging your back anymore. I will do your legs and your neck but nothing else. I suggest you go to Body Talk and maybe they can help you there." I could have cried right then and there. I thought that maybe I was doing a little better from what the physiotherapist had told me and I felt hung out to dry on my own now. I looked into Body Talk but it was an alternative treatment that I was not open to trying.
There were many massage appointments where my body just wouldn't respond properly to the treatment, which became even more frustrating. I'd explain the areas that were giving me the most grief that week and my RMT would get that spot settled and then go to move on to another area, but then have the area that she just released, seize right back up. It happened over and over again. It was like the relentless game of wack a mole but I had absolutely no control over it. There were a handful of appointments where she refused any payment as she felt that she didn't even make a difference with my body. I felt so awful and those same feelings of guilt came up, the feeling of disappointing, which I know may seem silly to some, but those were the feelings that I regularly dealt with. It was another thing in me that kept rearing it's ugly head, and there was nothing that I could do to get my body to respond better, no matter how hard I wanted it to. I constantly felt like I was letting everyone down wherever I went.
I had a friend tell me about her experience with this other chiropractor and she thought maybe his approach could be helpful and so I decided to switch gears and see if he could help with my issues.
I know it may sound silly to people but I fall in love with people really fast and easy. It was very hard for me to switch chiropractors and when my massage therapist had to go on maternity leave, that was hard too. These practitioners not only are the ones that are working on you and helping you but they become your support system. They see me at my worst and have walked me through many of my hard, dark days. They hear about the very raw details of my life, things that I don't even express to my husband sometimes or even close friends. So again, it's this grief of change that I have to go through each and every time. Many of my massage therapists have become some very close friends of mine and we still stay in contact.
I booked the appointment with the new chiropractor. He did his assessment and set me up with an X-ray. When I got the X-ray results back, it showed my body from head to toe, completely out of wack. He told me that he had seen these issues before and gave me an estimate of the magic 10 treatments and I'd be good as new. At this point I wasn't so quick at jumping in with full faith that this would be true for me and so I asked him if he knew of anyone that was similar to my issues that I could speak with that had seen results. A woman that I had seen around town growing up was already in the office for her appointment and she happily came up to me and shared with me her story. She told me that she had pretty much been bed ridden and had tried multiple avenues of treatments and had no luck. She decided to give this particular chiropractor a go and ended up getting most of her life back. That was all I needed to spur on the hope! I excitedly went home telling my husband all about this and he looked at me and said, "Keana, we've been through this over and over again. What makes you think it's going to be different this time?" I explained this woman's story and it convinced him enough for me to start this new avenue. I ended up having to go see this chiropractor sometimes three times a week, as there were different treatments involved besides the usual "cracking" stuff. I had to take certain supplements, drink this gross salt water drink, sit on these wobbly chairs and do this whole routine before I had my treatment, and every morning before getting out of bed - do a whole routine. I was in a lot of pain. I kept on telling myself things like, "no pain, no gain," and "you've got this, keep going!" At one of my visits we did an inverted table treatment, where you are partially put upside down with these weight things. My right leg went numb and it freaked me out. They immediately put the table upright and we stopped it right then and there.
At this point in time, the car insurance company had graciously helped pay for house cleaning, as that was all too hard on my body to do. There were specific guidelines on what they needed in order to cover the house cleaning and being in a small town, we didn't have the luxury of options. My husband decided to reach out the janitor at his work and asked if he'd be willing to take us on as a client but he was so swamped he was unable to provide anyone. He came up with an idea that if we could come up with someone, he would hire them and we could use them as our cleaner. I was so beyond grateful as it was a weight lifted for me to not have to worry about my house, but as time went on my heart struggled with it. I know, I know it's every woman's dream to have a house cleaner but it hit me hard that I had no choice in the matter because it was my body that made it that way not just some decision that we had decided. I eventually felt frustrated because I wanted to be able to clean up my own mess and not have to rely on someone else to do it for me. Eventually the amount of cleaning times offered up to me came to an end from the insurance company.
When my physiotherapist had advocated for me to get switched to someone higher up in the car insurance company it was a relief. But the relief didn't last long as the man on the other end of the phone would start off really nice and then do the classic "switch" and hammer into me with the same script that I had gotten before from the previous people that were handling my case. This one conversation he had opened up to me about his personal injury story that he had experienced while playing hockey. He told me that he had been bed ridden and tried prolotherapy and it was life changing and thought he would throw that out there to me, off record. He then did a quick switch and hammered into me saying things like, "Are you sure you didn't just step off the curb wrong and that's why you're hurt?" It was so demeaning and frustrating especially since he just had told me about his own personal injury. This one time he phoned, my husband was home and I decided to put the phone on speaker phone so that my husband could finally understand what I was talking about with the whole "switch" thing. He started to hammer into me again and my husband jumped in and told the man to stop talking so disrespectfully to me and that from now on, he could speak directly to my husband and no longer needed to speak to me because it was too distressing for me.
We had now reached the year mark since my car accident and up until this time the car insurance company paid 100% of my treatments. This all came to a sudden hault once the one year mark came around. We got a phone call offering us around $5,000 and said that they would no longer be paying for my treatments, they also said "Take it or leave it," in a round about way through an e-mail. We tried to reason with them and tried sending in our receipts anyways to see if they would cover them but they never did. We were now cut off. I had told them that I wasn't willing to except any money because I was still not better and had no idea as to what was causing my delay in getting better, but they wouldn't have it.
We struggled for a few months and got some advice from trusted friends on what we should do. I thought that getting lawyers involved into the mix was a bad and an un-Christian thing to do and just wanted to peacefully go at this the right way, but the car insurance company wouldn't bother with us anymore. We prayerfully made the decision that we needed to get lawyers involved at this point and so I did some research and interviewed a few lawyers.
I remember chatting with this one guy and he got so heated with me on the phone that I had signed the waiver for the car insurance company to have access to all of my medical records. I did that because I wanted to prove that I had nothing to hide and to be as transparent and open and honest as I could be with them. He wouldn't let the issue go and so I knew he wasn't the right fit for me. I then interviewed this woman and I started telling her about my journey, where she briskly interrupted me and told me that she didn't care about the details and to just answer her yes and no questions. She wasn't the right fit as I needed someone to support me and make me feel safe and heard. I then interviewed this older man. He had this grandpa vibe about him and a little whistle noise that you could hear flow through his two front teeth. He was so compassionate and reassured me that everything would be okay. "This is my guy," I thought. I talked it over with my husband and we decided together that this was the firm that would oversee our case. Little did I know that, that would be one of the only conversations that I would have with the whistle toothed man and that I would get passed off to a team of other lawyers in the firm.
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