peppersnow
Newcomer
Hello - I'm 49 years old, pretty healthy, and have had occasional severe back pain over the past 15 years, brought on by muscle spasms. The debilitating pain usually lasts 3 days to a week after spasms stop. About 1 1/2 years ago, I had an episode of muscle spasm pain that was severe, with spasms over 4 days...but after the spasms stopped, the lower back pain hung around and has been chronic ever since, even without spasms. I have been afraid that the spasms damaged something. I do have disc degeneration, but even my doctors at Mayo didn't think the degeneration was severe enough to cause this kind of pain. I found this site a few days ago. I was on a 7 hour drive alone in my car, and my lower back had been screaming at me by hour 3 (not unusual). At a rest stop, I looked for a podcast on back pain and found one that introduced me to TMS. After listening to the podcast and thinking about whether there was anything going on in my life 1 1/2 years ago that was very emotionally painful, I hit on something very specific that happened that exact time and could have been a trigger. I thought about that and talked myself through it for the next two hours -- realizing that I was still very upset about it -- and after I'd worked myself up into crying about it, realized that the pain was gone in my back. Soooooo...I'm all-in with regard to this journey of seeing if I can get control over this pain. My back started hurting pretty badly half-way through my workday today, so I signed up for this wiki over lunch and watched the intro videos with John Stossel. That's my intro - nice to find this and meet you, and onward and upward.
