Pain Relief from Fibromyalgia through little piece of plastic
I was that woman in the commercials. You know the one, sitting on a bench, sad-eyed and exhausted, while the rest of the world moves around her, waiting to tell the camera about her daily battle with chronic pain and fatigue. I’m sure you recognize her. Maybe you’re her too. Maybe you’re starting to become resigned, like I was, to a life of discomfort, medication, and missing out. Or maybe, like I did, you’ve had that breakthrough moment when you decide you are sick and tired of being sick and tired. It’s a powerful feeling to take control of your pain, and whether you believe it yet or not; it is possible to do that.
I’ve been experiencing chronic pain and fatigue since I was 15 years old. I’ve been tested, talked, poked, prodded, scanned, and psychoanalyzed. I’ve had physical therapy, diets, massages, and acupuncture, and I’ve taken enough medication to fill a pharmacy. My health wasn’t the only thing suffering. Between the pain and fatigue, and the endless side effects that come with taking a handful of prescription pain pills every day, my whole life felt like it was off-track. My work performance was lackluster. My social life took a backseat to lying in bed. College fell by the wayside, and my goals and dreams seemed further and further away. Finally, there I was, in my late twenties… the “prime of life”… a depressed, exhausted, hurting, anti-social wreck, when, out of the fog (you know the fog I’m talking about), came my own breakthrough moment.
I stopped eating the mountains of prescription pain medication that the doctors gave me every time I told them that what they were doing wasn’t working. I decided that I’d rather live with the pain within my own body than cope with what the pills were doing. It was a miserable few weeks of withdrawal, but coming out on the other side meant that I could finally know exactly what my own body was doing, unmasked by medication and side effects. Next, I did what I’m doing here. I wrote. I wrote for anyone who has ever dealt with the misery of a so-called “invisible illness” that others, including doctors, don’t seem to understand. It wasn’t so much a cry for help, but a cry for understanding, and it wound up as an editorial in the local newspaper. Over the next couple of months, I got phone calls, e-mails, and letters from people across the country who shared my experience, or who finally understood what a loved one was going through. It meant a lot that I had touched lives, but one of those calls would change mine completely.
Dr. Childress was among the people who had read my outpouring of frustration, and he asked me to meet with him regarding a potential treatment. You might have the same reaction that I did, which was to be a bit confused as to what a dentist thought he could offer me to relieve widespread chronic pain and fatigue. You might also find it a bit laughable at first when I tell you that what he thought he could offer was, essentially, a piece of plastic that was molded to fit my mouth. Still, as anyone who has coped with chronic pain knows, desperate times call for desperate measures and it wasn’t a pill or a surgery, so it couldn’t hurt to try.
When he explained the process and showed me his videos on how the MAGO worked, his idea began to make sense in my mind, but when, on the very first night I wore it, I slept through the night and woke feeling rested, my body began to reward this leap of faith.
I won’t tell you that the MAGO magically made all of my symptoms disappear. It didn’t, and that wasn’t the expectation anyway. What it did do, however, was eliminate so many of them that the doctors were forced to look deeper into the ones that remained. The muddled mass began to dissolve into just a handful of things that needed attention. This clearer picture allowed for recognition and targeted treatment of, for example, Vitamins B12 and D deficiencies, which had been buried for a decade under the blanket diagnosis that covered the most symptoms on my chart. Not only that, but with the newfound rest and lack of pain that I enjoyed because of the MAGO, I found that I could do other things to continue to improve my health. Instead of exercise earning me another day in bed, I felt invigorated when I could go for a walk or a swim. I stopped waking up expecting to feel awful. I quit hanging on to my prescription pills “just in case I really needed one.” The MAGO didn’t just offer a life with less pain. It offered a life with less limits.
It’s been a couple of years now since I took this unexpected detour in my journey, and I just had my MAGO adjusted after having some fillings. I am still free of pain medication, but more importantly, I am living life again. I went back to school and earned my associate’s degree, one step closer to the Master of Counseling Psychology that I have been dreaming of. I travelled to Europe to visit Normandy and the World War II foxholes left behind from the Battle of the Bulge, and I averaged 3-5 miles of walking per day, including the beach, up and down cliffs, and through the woods, with no pain or fatigue. I came home and accomplished a lifelong dream when I published my first book, and I will be returning on an even longer trip in December. If you’re reading this, you probably already know the sheer awesomeness of feeling well enough to willingly brave freezing temperatures that would normally leave you huddled under a blanket, trying to hide from the pain. I can do things around my house. I can enjoy spending time with family and friends. I can do volunteer work. I feel like a person again because, two years ago, I gave a dentist the opportunity to do what no doctor had been able to do.
I can live life on my terms now, and all because of a little piece of plastic.