Disclaimer: This is not medical advice. This is purely for educational purposes. If you are struggling with chronic pain, we recommended seeing a doctor and following their medical advice. We do not encourage the use of drugs or any illegal substances. If you have interest in using ketamine, we recommend talking with a doctor. If you are struggling with suicidal ideation, please see a licensed healthcare professional as soon as possible. You may also call 911 or contact the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988. 

Takeaways:

• It is possible to cure chronic pain.

• In this particular situation, ketamine cured chronic back pain. It is unknown if this is an effective treatment strategy for all people with chronic pain.

• Suicidal ideation is a common experience for people with chronic pain. There is hope for curing both.

• Mental health and physical health are deeply connected.

• Address traumas that you have experienced in your life.

• Breathwork and learning to “breathe into the pain” can be effective coping strategies.

Can you give us a brief overview of your story with chronic pain?

My chronic pain really started when I was a kid around the age of 8. I slipped and fell in the garage and it pretty much crushed my tailbone. I didn’t know how to explain that to anyone. I didn’t think anyone would be believe how bad it was, so I kind of suffered with that throughout my whole childhood.  

Later I went into dance. I’ve been a dancer my whole life. I did ballet for years and then I went into cheerleading and I injured my back really badly. I was throwing this girl up in the air and the girl that was supposed to help me catch her wasn’t there for some reason. I caught this girl with my whole being and I later found out in the hospital that I have spinal degeneration. I was only 16 at the time. No one told me what to do for that, and they basically wanted to fuse my spine. 

Fast forward to getting pregnant and I had back pain my whole entire pregnancies and both times the back pain was debilitating. I needed people to help pull me out of bed and I would get stuck in certain positions and be unable to move. That went on throughout my 20s and 30s. 

When I was in my 40s, I slipped and fell in Vegas. I was promoting the Manny Pacquiao fight that took place in 2011 and we were running back to our hotel rooms so we could get changed to go out and I slipped and fell on granite floor twice. When I did this the second time, I felt energy go through my body and then I couldn’t feel my legs anymore. I thought I was peeing my pants and that I had broken my back. 

This was a huge fiasco because it happened at Caesar’s Palace and they took me in an ambulance to the hospital. They checked my neck and said that I was fine because I didn’t have a broken neck and they sent me home. I went back the next day because I needed my records because I wanted to know what happened to me. It took five years for me to get doctors to really look at me and tell me what had happened. I blew out two discs and ruptured a third one and this was on my lumbar and sacral spine. It was my whole entire lower back. 

I was not a person who does drugs at all. I couldn’t even handle painkillers. They make me vomit really bad. They prescribed me tons and tons of painkillers. I went and filled prescriptions and literally had bottles of all different types of pain killers. I couldn’t take them because I would just throw up. I had anti-nausea medications and those didn’t help. Thank God for that or I would totally be addicted to opiates right now. 

I began to drink because drinking was the only thing that alleviated the pain. I was probably at a level of six to seven out of ten in pain every single day and that was not including after a hard day’s work. I managed my house, I managed my kids, and I worked as an esthetician so I was sitting a lot. I was in so much pain at the end of the day. 

I ended up getting nerve ablation three separate times. The literally burned them because I couldn’t function. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I started drinking. Those first couple of nights of being drunk for the first time in my life and feeling relief from the pain was so dramatic for me. I decided that instead of taking opiates, I’ll just drink each night before I go to sleep. It turned into almost 10 years of pretty much being an alcoholic, but I wouldn’t have considered myself an alcoholic because I only drank when my back was really hurting. I got a DUI during this time and it was crazy to me because I had never put myself in the category of the type of person who could get a DUI. I was just trying to help myself survive. 

After the DUI, in my mind, I couldn’t be a nurse. I was in my last semester of nursing school when I got it. I flipped out and dropped out of nursing school. I pulled away from nursing. 

At that point in my life, I was pretty suicidal. I was thinking, “I have taken up all this time to go to nursing school for my children and I. And I just blew it”. Really it was because I was in so much pain every day and I didn’t even know how I could be a nurse with this much pain. I couldn’t even get up or brush my teeth without help somedays. There were others days when I would be on my hands and knees crawling around my house. 

I got into the cannabis industry because it seemed to be the only natural thing and it was an alternative from alcohol. I had read that cannabis can help restore and regenerate cells. I thought that this was going to fix my back. 

I was still pretty suicidal at this point. I thought about it every day. I thought about the best way to do it, but I would also think about my kids. You always hear about kids who have mental illness in their family because mom or dad committed suicide. I didn’t want to leave that legacy, but I didn’t want to be here anymore because I was in so much pain all the time.  

It’s like how do people in chronic pain even function? The answer is they don’t. The pain is literally always there. It’s like this big monster on your shoulder all the time. You’re trying to have a great time. You’re trying to go out and do stuff. I couldn’t even go to Disneyland or go on rides anymore because the pain was so bad. 

My kids are 18 and 23 now, but when they were younger, I would go to their events and I would be sitting there in pain and wishing the event would end sooner. I was always up and walking around and they were so annoyed with me. They would ask, “Why can’t you just sit down and enjoy yourself?” And I couldn’t. I had no joy in my life even though I tried and I pretended for such a long time. 

I met this woman who grey weed for a living and I was really intrigued by her because she had been in a car accident and experienced an injury. She was always smoking cannabis and taking CBD. I saw her again a year later and she was just standing there as if she was okay and pain free. So I asked her, “What did you do? What changed your life?”. She told me that she had started ketamine. She would take a little troche of it. I had never heard of that before. 

I was a little unsure because she was a very ceremonial and spiritual person. She did ceremonies with cannabis, MDMA, mushrooms, and other stuff. But I was interested in whatever got her to the point where she was obviously not in pain anymore. You could see it on her face because she used to grimace all the time from pain. I was willing to try anything to be pain free at this point.  

She said that we should try a ketamine ceremony. We were up in her room and she had it all set up for a ceremony. I didn’t do a lot of research on it because I was so desperate. It was either this was going to work or I’m going to die. And to be honest, I did a lot of other things before ketamine. I had tried mushrooms because I was trying to contact my soul and have this major conversation with myself before getting to a point of committing suicide. 

When I took the ketamine, I immediately left my body. I had never been able to see myself in the third person. I was hovering above myself and I saw this angry, frustrated, sad, joyless person lying on a bed. I just got this flood of information. I remember thinking, “You hate on yourself so much and you hate on your pain and you have never tried to connect with it”. I didn’t know what to expect from the ketamine and what was going to happen. It showed me how angry and frustrated I was with myself. Previously I was always a dancer and I had always been moving and there I was unable to heal. I was always so frustrated with my inability to heal. 

Then I saw three angels come down and they were covering me with their wings. They started repairing my back and one of them said, “Now love this part of you and speak to it”. I kept saying, “Thank you for healing me”. Then all of a sudden, I felt like something had zipped up my spine and I felt this sense of ecstasy. I felt this sense of complete bliss and like I was being held in the angels’ arms. I was as light as a feather. It was the freest I have ever felt in my whole entire life. As the effects were wearing off I thought, “That was so nice, but I’m coming back to my life and back to pain”.  

Then I stood up from the bed and I heard a voice telling me that I could touch my toes. I hadn’t been able to touch my toes in years due to the pain. So I bent down and touched my toes and I started sobbing because that was the first time in years that I had felt that expanse in my back. It was the craziest and most freeing feeling and that hasn’t gone away. I did that in 2019 and my pain has not returned since then. It’s taken me four years to fully receive my healing and accept that the pain is not going to come back. There’s a part of me that has been waiting for the pain to return. 

From 2011 to 2019 I was suicidal and I remember sitting by a lake at my house and I would just cry and beg God to take my life because I couldn’t do it anymore. Now I sing praises to ketamine all the time. People are so afraid of it because it sounds so scary. People still refer to it as a street drug called “Special K”. If that’s what you want to call it, fine. But I’m telling you that ketamine like synchronizes with the body and mind. Speaking healing to my body was something that I had never done before. I realized that I had trillions of cells that wanted to hear what I had to say. I started teaching people about this because if you’re hating on yourself and a certain area of your body, then you’re putting a bunch of negative energy into that area of your body. It’s just going to make the pain worse. You’re body is going to give you what you focus on so when I started focusing on healing and receiving that healing, my life changed. 

I don’t have any problems with my back anymore. Every once in a while, I overdo it while doing yoga or belly dancing. I had never thought that in a million years, I would ever be capable of moving my hips like that again. They had wanted to fuse my sacral spine all the way up to my thoracic spine. Today when I visit my doctors in Irvine, they can’t believe that I’m walking without any pain and I’m almost 50 years old. They had thought that if I didn’t get this fusion surgery, I was going to end up in a wheelchair. 

I received my healing and now I refuse to even go an get MRIs and scans like that because I don’t care what my spine looks like according to what medical science says. I know my body and I know it is healed. I was just recently doing a body building exercise with my daughter that involved hip thrusts and I was able to lift 40 to 50 pounds on my stomach and bring my hips all the way up. I did tweak my back a little and I thought, “I’m not letting that get into my head and I’m not going to think about it. I didn’t even take ibuprofen. I just stopped doing the workout and did something else. I redirected my energy. I’m not saying that I can’t injury myself, but I know that with this healing came the responsibility of continuing to receive it. 

Wow thank you for sharing all of that. You have been through the ringer with pain and mental health. I really appreciate you bringing up your suicidal thoughts because this is common for people with chronic pain. I want people in pain to know that they’re not alone in this experience. I went through it. You went through it. I’ve met so many other people who have gone through it and it’s terrifying when those thoughts start happening. But then you meet people who have gone through the same stuff and they were able to overcome their physical and emotional pain. Just knowing that it’s possible is amazing because you encounter so many people that tell you it’s not possible to get better. I have heard people with chronic pain say that, nurses have said it, and I’ve heard doctors say it. It is so refreshing to hear someone say the words, “You can get better”.  

That hopelessness is so insidious and thank God whatever it was inside of me that kept me searching. I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Although I almost did. I really did almost commit suicide. I knew how to do it, but there was a small part of me that just kept saying that I needed to be there for my kids. I needed to be here for them to support them. Thank God because I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have kids. I probably would have done it. I was not just miserable. I was in complete and utter darkness. It was hell for me. It was like I was always seeing my life from behind a prison of pain. 

It’s like you were a hostage in your own body. 

I was being constantly tortured and nobody would get it. Even my oldest daughter is still upset with me. She doesn’t really talk to me very much because she thought I was just avoiding her all of those years. How do you explain to your kids that you have no joy because your constantly in pain? There’s nothing else you can really say. I remember growing up, I had a boyfriend in high school and his mom had chronic pain due to a car accident. I was 15 at the time so I didn’t really understand what she was going through, but I remember always seeing her on the couch and always being high on opiates and whatever else they were giving her. She ended up passing away right after we graduated high school and I remember everyone talking about her like she was a loser. 

I could have easily had the same experience and she wasn’t a loser. She was in so much pain. She showed me the pictures of what the car looked like after the accident. It’s a miracle that she even survived. It makes me sad that she was never able to get relief from that pain because she was so stuck in whatever the doctors had told her.  

I almost got a pain pump when I was in pain. I tried using a TENS unit. I tried pretty much everything that is out there. I got nerve ablations done and they have to put you under for that. That was so freeing for me when I felt that hit of propofol because it was a brief moment of escape. Everything would just relax. My neck was hurting because it had been overcompensating for my lower back. I was out of shape. I was getting gross because I was just sitting there doing nothing so I had all this tension in my body. 

It breaks my heart when people are in pain and they don’t tap into an alternative method of treatment. Instead they take all of these medications that are causing damage on top of all the pain. 

That is the sad thing about our health care system. There are so many people in healthcare who are good at treating chronic pain, but it’s so easy to get stuck with the wrong doctors or any healthcare practitioner that points you in the wrong direction. It might be the right direction for some people, but for you it could be the absolute wrong direction. And you get stuck thinking that only certain treatments are available to you. 

I still remember getting seen by doctors and specialists who would try three or four things and when those didn’t work, they would say, “That’s all there is to try. I don’t think there is anything else that we can do”. And I just want to go back and tell those doctors that they were wrong.  

If you have any doctor or medical professional who is communicating to their patients that no more treatments are available and they’re going to be in pain forever, just know that is not the truth. 

Every single one of them told me that. They all wanted me to take the surgery route. When I was in nursing school, I got to see a massive spinal surgery on a woman who had been hit by a car while riding a bike. She was like 46 or 48 at the time. They had to cut her open from her neck all the way to her sacrum and they did a spinal fusion surgery on her. If I hadn’t seen that, I probably would have let them do a spinal fusion surgery on me. People need to know what they’re doing when they have a spinal fusion. Obviously some people need it, but for the average person who has chronic pain, I don’t think it’s a good idea to be cutting into your fascia, muscles, and nerves. It takes a lot of work to come back from a surgery like that. I was so lucky that I got to see that. 

The doctors were encouraging me to get this surgery or to get a pain pump installed. I went out and started researching alternative eastern medicine. That helped me get into having an open mind to alternatives that Western medicine doesn’t provide. 

I want doctors to give ketamine to their patients and I know that they sometimes give it to people in trauma, but that’s not the way to do it. Ketamine is meant to be a spiritual experience. I have had people tell me horror stories about being given ketamine in the hospital and they would see a bunch of bad stuff. That’s not the way it should be given. It should be consensual. If you just woke up from a car accident and now you’re on ketamine, that can be kind of traumatic. 

Yeah, I do see it given in the hospital setting sometimes. I know there is more research on it lately and more specifically in regards to a pain condition known as Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. They’re doing this research at USC Keck and they’re seeing a good amount of success with ketamine infusions. It’s still newer research, but I think it’s something that will help a lot of people in the future. 

Yeah, after doing some research I discovered that there are quite a few ketamine clinics. There are some here in LA and Orange County. That’s kind of what I want to do. When I grow up, I want to have a center where I help people with chronic pain and other issues like addictions. I would really love to be able to give ketamine infusions to people. That would probably be a better way to take it. I believe that in the right setting, ketamine is a miracle. I hope they continue to research it because it really is life changing. 

Having that healing, it was like my body intuitively knew that I can’t stress out about things the way I have been anymore. I found alternative ways to dealing with stress. I started getting into breath work and meditation. 

Can you go over with me some of the things you tried to reduce your pain, what worked the best, and why it was ultimately ketamine that made your pain go away? 

I tried pretty much everything that they threw at me. I had gained 100 pounds during my pregnancy with my daughter because I had some disorder where I had too much amniotic fluid. They kept telling me that they needed to drain some of the amniotic fluid and I wouldn’t let them do it because I knew that if they stuck a needle in there it could cause an infection. I had her in 2005 and I couldn’t walk. I was carrying her around and trying to nurse her and I had so much pain.  

Six months after I had her, I went to five different doctors and I was like something needs to be done because I couldn’t breathe. I felt like everything in my back was stuck. The doctor gave me a fentanyl patch. I had never heard of that before. I was so ignorant. My grandfather was a doctor so I thought that I knew a lot about illnesses, but I knew very little about chronic pain. 

After putting on the fentanyl patch, I remember just sitting there and all of a sudden this sense of doom washed over me and I started to vomit profusely. I vomited so much that my husband at the time called 911. I was taken to the hospital and they didn’t know what was wrong with me. I had never taken anything like this before and I didn’t even know that fentanyl was an opiate. The doctor had told me that this was a great alternative to oral painkillers because I had told him that I can’t take painkillers. So I was like great, lets try it. 

At the hospital, I was still throwing up and they didn’t know what to do until they found the fentanyl patch. They were like, “I thought you were allergic to opiates” and I said that I am. They told me this was the worst opiate I could possibly get 

The nerve ablation was probably the only thing that gave me relief. But it was always in the back of my mind that the pain was going to come back. On a daily basis my pain was at a seven. I would cry pretty much every day. I would cry getting in and out of the car. I even went out and bought a brand new Lexus they had come out with because I couldn’t sit in the smaller one. I had to get the bigger one and I didn’t even have the money for that. I spent like $60,000 on a car so that I could comfortably get in and out. I’m 5’8” and I needed the car to be right at my level. It took me a year to make a decision to buy that car. That’s how good it was for my back. 

The nerve ablation did help. It took off the edge but the procedure is painful. They knock you out which is great because I got to escape for a couple of hours. I loved my pain care doctors. They were always happy to see me and happy to see me go home feeling better. Eventually my nerves would grow back and as soon as I felt that first twinge of pain I would get so depressed, thinking, “Oh no, it’s here again”. I would even ask myself, “Can I continue to do this?” Every time they go into your back and do the nerve ablation, you’re risking a certain amount of safety for your back. But it was worth it to me because other than the alcohol that was the only thing that relieved my pain. 

The alcohol was the only thing that I could really control. I could go to the store after a horrible day and buy a bottle of wine. I would drink and alleviate my pain to the point where I could dance. Then the next day I would pay for it because once the alcohol wore off, the pain was worse. I only have one kidney because I have polycystic kidney disease so everything stays in my system longer than the average person. I would feel horrible after drinking and I couldn’t sustain that. I don’t understand how people become functional alcoholics because I was definitely not functional. I was an every once in a while alcoholic because even just two or three glasses of wine made me feel like I was going to die. 

I can’t think of anything else that actually took the pain away which is why I was so suicidal. It wasn’t like I could just take a couple of tylenol and be fine. I tried massage and acupuncture. I tried a lot of alternatives and none of it even touched the pain. 

Ever since the ketamine, emotional and physical pain are not a part of me anymore. I very rarely get even a twinge of that anymore. I used to think about suicide every single day. It was a constant internal conversation. I could be at a birthday party or something like that and I would just be sitting there thinking about how I’m going to kill myself. 

You wanted an escape. You wanted to be free of pain, the medical system, and all the things that weren’t working. I think it makes a lot of sense that you turned to alcohol because if you find something that can numb the pain, that can be life changing, even if it’s something that’s unhealthy. Just the idea of getting to feel like a somewhat normal human who is not in constant pain can be so powerful. It makes complete and total sense. I’m guessing you eventually got to a point where you were able to stop drinking. 

Yeah, because I never really got addicted to it. I was conscious of every single time I took a drink. Once I start drinking, it obviously shuts down my ability to make good choices. But it was a great exchange for the relief that it gave me. Yet I don’t struggle with alcoholism at all. That’s why I didn’t call myself an alcoholic and I couldn’t believe when I got a DUI over this. I was smart about it, but clearly not that day. I got to a point where I saw it as medicine. 

Now I really have a heart for people that are addicts because they are trying to escape something. If it’s not physical pain, it’s probably emotional pain or spiritual pain. I don’t see substance abuse the way that I used to before. Thank God I didn’t get addicted to alcohol to the point where I would have gone through withdrawals or anything like that. 

I know a lot of people who are in and out of treatment. I have family members who have gotten away from addictions. They’re a year and a half sober and they’re just now starting to figure out what makes them so susceptible to these addictions. A lot of it is the opiate itself because it’s insidious and it blocks you from being able to make your own internal pain medicine. When the opioid wears off, your pain so much worse. It’s a cyclical thing that you get into with opiates and alcohol. That’s why I have a heart for substance abusers and I wouldn’t even call it abuse. Like I said, it’s an escape.  

That’s why it’s so weird that I battled with pain for so long and then it ends up being a substance that in my normal life, I never would have tried. I would have said, “You’re out of your mind if you think that I’m going to try some Special K”. And it’s still a Schedule 1 drug. 

Yeah, they put marijuana, psychogenic mushrooms, and ketamine as Schedule 1 drugs. In order for something to be classified as a Schedule 1 drug, there has to be no medicinal benefits and they must have a high potential for abuse. There are researchers who want to study this stuff to determine if they can be used to treat certain disorders. Yet very little research has been done because they are Schedule 1 drugs. We could be making bigger leaps. We could be making more progress. But right now the research is so controlled and regulated. We don’t know as much as we could about these things. 

Yeah and we are in this “Say no to drugs” culture but I think it needs to be addressed when it’s ingrained in your brain that anything outside of pharmaceuticals is drugs. Now there is a lot of guilt and shame involved when you try anything outside of medically prescribed methods. People look down on you for doing anything alternative. I used to judge people for getting things like acupuncture done. I would say, “You’re so weird with all of your woo-woo methods”. That’s what I used to say to my friend who introduced me to ketamine. She was lighting sage all the time and doing other woo-woo things. And now I work with crystals. They’re just minerals from the earth. Our bodies have minerals in them. 

I want to say that this one of the benefits of going through any type of chronic condition. You become more open minded and less judgmental. Things that didn’t make sense before make sense now. Now you see other people suffering with psychological or physical problems and you have a deeper understanding of what they’re going through. You now have a deeper understanding of what suffering is and why people do the things that they do to escape that suffering. At the end of the day, you can’t put a price on being pain free. Most people would give just about anything to be pain free. 

It becomes a life or death situation for a lot of people with chronic pain. I think that’s what people who have never had chronic pain don’t understand. They’ll say things like, “At least you’re not dying. At least it’s not cancer”. And your just thinking, “But I wish I was dead”. 

It’s the strangest feeling because chronic pain and emotional pain go hand in hand. There is a lot of guilt and shame involved and everyone wants to dismiss because nobody wants to be reminded all the time. It’s the same with grief. I recently lost a family member and nobody wants to bring it up and talk about that grief. If I hadn’t gone through my back pain and that level of suffering, I don’t think I would have been able to deal with the loss of my step-son. I understand grief because I was grieving for years and years because of the loss of my body. 

In a way, I received a weird understanding of my value. Suffering allowed me to see myself and my experience here as valuable. I don’t know if that makes sense. For so long I didn’t see any value in myself because I felt like such a burden all of the time. People get so annoyed and so you learn to shut up. You learn to just suck it up and pretend like it’s not there, but it is always in the back of your mind. You start saying that you have to go home because your back is hurting, but they’ve heard it a 1000 times. 

I went to go visit my son when he was in kindergarten for the very first time. I snuck in and was watching him from afar. One of the outdoor teachers came over to me and she said, “Is that your son right there?” And I said yeah and that it’s his first week. Then she asked me if I had a back injury. I said yeah, why? And she said that every time he goes out to play he puts his hand on his back and walks around saying, “No, no. Wait, wait. My back, my back”. That broke my heart because I didn’t realize how it was part of my every day life that he picked up on it and was now taking it to the playground at school. 

I’ve watched people in my own life constantly complain about their neck pain and constantly tell me that they’re going in for neck surgery. I’d be thinking, “God, get over it”. My aunt started out with a neck injury and then it went to fibromyalgia and then all of these other issues. She pretty much spent the last twenty years of her life in bed. She was never able to resolve her pain, no matter how many surgeries she had. I was annoyed by that because I was getting up and doing stuff. But in the end, I was in the same place. I was rotting from inside. I was judging everybody else and then being frustrated with myself. 

It’s a bigger issue than most people want to talk about or accept, especially when they have a family member that has an addiction because of it. 

That makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of people struggle with talking about chronic pain because they don’t have a solution for it. If you bring up a problem they don’t know how to resolve, they don’t really know how to respond. 

I 100% agree with that because they probably feel just as helpless. The pain was probably a catalyst for my failed relationships. Obviously divorce is divorce and there’s not too much you can do, but it definitely didn’t help that they didn’t understand what I was going through. Neither of my ex-husbands got it and they weren’t there for me and didn’t help me with my chronic back pain. I felt really unseen and unheard. I was running a household with children and all I wanted was for somebody to care. It would have been so nice for someone to stay, “Let me try to alleviate that pain for you. Let me run you a bath. Let me give you a back rub”. I just wanted more compassionate people in my life because I’m always the one with compassion. Like I’m pretty sure in your story you talked about your dad and he was the one who really had your back. 

Yeah, I give my dad credit for the fact that I don’t really have pain anymore. That’s something I wish I could give to every patient that I work with. I wish every patient had one solid person in their life that’s gonna be there for them, no matter what. I was scared to research my own pain because I was afraid the internet was going to tell me that I was screwed and that I was never going to be free from pain. So my dad went and did all the work for me. He found the specialists, doctors, and physical therapists that were able to help me. Everyone needs someone like that in their lives. I hope that someday Chronic Pain Hope will be able to provide that level of support for people with pain. At the end of the day, you need someone who loves you and believes that you can get better. My dad used to say, “It’s not if you get better, it’s when you get better”. I want that level of confidence and support for everyone. 

I was able to find that in myself, thank God because pretty much everybody treated me as if I just needed to get over it already. You’re really lucky that you had that, but you’re also lucky that you didn’t let it become a crutch. That’s what some people will do. You still did all of the work. I mean look at what you’re doing right now. Some people are afraid to look at their own pain, research it, understand it, and then do the work to pull people out. Some people have given up and I understand because I almost did. 

Until you have had a debilitating injury that doesn’t heal, you don’t even understand the concept of being unable to fix yourself or giving up. I’m really glad that your dad was there for you. My kids were my motivation. And it was all worth it because I am now on a trajectory to help other people. 

And then you have another problem where once the physical pain goes away, people still tend to struggle with the emotional pain. People tend to assume that once the physical pain is gone, the depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts will immediately go away. Unfortunately, that is not the case for a lot of people. It takes time to relearn how to love yourself. You almost have to go through a process of grieving, self-forgiveness, and self-compassion. You have to rediscover who you are again because you’ve spent so many years being this person in pain. Who are you now that the pain is gone? 

Yeah because the pain did define me. And this is the first time that I’ve ever been able to sit down and tell my story. That’s why I’m kind of all over the place because I’ve never really told anybody from beginning to end what I’ve been through. And boy, does it feel good to be able to actually get it out there. In a way, this is almost like closure for me. For so long it was such a major part of my being. Sometimes, I almost try to feel it again just to kind of like remember it. That little twinge of doubt will come back and I still have to pull myself out of that and say “No, you were healed, now receive that healing”.  

This is something they teach me in therapy. I’ve done a load of therapy for chronic pain and they tell you to talk to your pain and to talk to your body. Your body is not the enemy and it’s not something you need to be scared of. Your body is meant to be taken care of and loved. Self-compassion is a big thing they advocate for in therapy because so many people with chronic pain struggle with shame, guilt, and self-hatred. I struggled with self-hatred for the longest time. Like I truly loathed myself. It was hard to eventually recognize that I have value and worth. It took time to recognize that my life still means something, regardless of the pain that I’m in, regardless of what I accomplish, my life still has meaning. 

So many people get stuck thinking that they don’t matter anymore. It’s so easy to get stuck in that mindset. 

That’s so incredible to hear you say that because I look at you and I’m like, “How could you ever think that in your being? How could you ever think that you’re not valuable?”  

I used to see my body as this separate vehicle but ketamine made me realize that it is part of my being. My thoughts and words impact the cells within me. It literally told me that the part of my body that I hate the most needs to hear the words, “I love you”. If you sit there and tell yourself that I’m ugly, I’m gross, I’m fat, and other things like that, then that is what you’ll become. People look at me like I’m crazy when I say this, but you need to speak to your body. I’m a caregiver right now and I tell my clients to speak to their pain. I know it sounds stupid, but just think about it for a minute. If what you’re doing hasn’t worked up to this point, why not try something different? 

When you recognize your value and see your body as a temple, that’s when things start to shift. I never saw my body as a temple. I always saw it as something that needs to get into shape. I labeled myself as gross especially when I was in pain and I thought that I was never going to be able to get back into the gym. Before chronic pain, I would be at the gym on the elliptical for hours to keep my body in shape. 

Being able to get back into physical activity is the fun part of healing. That’s when you start to feel confident enough to return to activities that you had given up due to pain. For me that was being able to get back into rock climbing, surfing, and hiking again. The first time I went surfing after recovering from my pain, I was just sitting on my surfboard crying tears of joy because I had thought that I was never going to be able to surf again. I started to feel capable again. 

I’m going to transition to a slightly different topic. People with chronic pain deal with a lot of different types of healthcare workers. Can you tell us about any positive or negative experiences that you have had with any healthcare provider? 

I definitely have had positive experiences with pain care providers. They were very limited in what they could offer. It’s like they were following a specific protocol and they could only offer the things listed in that protocol. First, they do hydrocortisone injections and I think the nerve ablation was the gold standard in that office.  

I had a lot of doctors that treated me like it was all in my head. They were always baffled at the amount of pain that I was in and they didn’t really know how to treat me. They treated me as if they thought that I was exaggerating the pain. I didn’t feel seen or heard by any doctor, except for my pain doctors. I eventually stopped going to doctors because I was being told that there was nothing that anybody could do other than the fusion surgery. I had doctors telling me that I was going to be paralyzed by 45 if I didn’t do it. I’ve known too many people who had that surgery and they didn’t have good outcomes. They’re actually still in pain and the surgery made the pain worse. 

That’s very common. I think they have a term for it. I think it’s called failed back surgery syndrome. It’s because it is so common for people to get back surgeries expecting to be pain free afterwards and then their pain ends up being significantly worse. 

Yeah and it takes at least six months to heal from the surgery and to find out if it even worked. I was not willing to do that. 

When you were seeing these doctors did any of them ever encourage you to pursue alternative methods or work with pain psychologists? 

Never, never, never. It was always a bit of an awkward conversation in doctors appointments because I would be sitting there and say, “Okay, well you know why I’m here. I can’t handle this anymore” and they would say, “We don’t know what to tell you. You can’t take opioids so we can try gabapentin”. I tried so many medications, analgesias, rubs, and anything else they could prescribe. None of it worked, not even for five minutes. No one ever told me to try ketamine. It would have been great if someone had told me to go see a pain psychologist. Throughout this whole experience I would say that I saw at least 15 doctors. 

Is there any advice that you would give to any healthcare practitioner on how to better treat people with chronic pain? 

I’m thinking about all the doctors that I saw and I don’t think anyone of them would be open to offering something like ketamine therapy. I would hope that they would take it seriously and treat the whole body. Fixing my back with ketamine was a small part in the grand scheme of everything. I needed to fix a lot of things about myself. I needed to fix my diet so I switched to an anti-inflammatory diet. I started to understand mechanisms within the body and why it is so important to keep inflammation low in the body. Doctors won’t even tell you that. 

I started working on breathwork. When you allow breath to come into your body and move throughout your body, it releases trauma. Breath has been a huge modality. It’s like I’m moving stuck energy in my body so if I have some back pain, I can breathe through it. That has been a miracle for me. I never understood what it meant to “breathe through your pain” until I started to do it. It has helped me through everything that I’ve been going through emotionally and physically. I think a lot of people want to run from pain and I’m done with the running because it eventually comes back to you and you’re going to have to face it. You’re going to have to stand before it. Now I have taught myself that when I feel pain, I just breathe through it and I will follow it through every piece of my body. Then I release it and I imagine it as light coming into my body and a dark ribbon of pain leaving my body. I think that visual really helps me. 

It’s very interesting listening to your experience with ketamine and breathwork because something I talk a lot about on my website is this therapy called Pain Reprocessing Therapy. This is the therapy that helped me get out of my chronic pain. This therapy involves being able to look at your pain, accept it, breathe into it, and to not be afraid of it. You need to recognize that it is a signal and it’s there for a reason. 

The way you have been describing ketamine, it almost sounds like someone took pain reprocessing therapy and turned it into a drug or medication that you can take and get the same experience. It’s almost like you’re describing my experience with Pain Reprocessing Therapy. 

Maybe the person who came up with Pain Reprocessing Therapy had that experience. 

Breathing into pain is definitely beneficial. It’s like when you’re giving birth and you’re breathing into contractions. You can’t fight that. Every muscle that you have in your belly is being squeezed and you have no choice but to breathe through it. You’re saying, “Fine, we’re going to go through this together”. And then being able to release after all of that pain, it’s like everything coming together. It’s closure. 

I’ve noticed that when people experience emotional or physical trauma, they try to hide it or cover it up with a Band-Aid or painkiller. When really you need to slow down and find out why you’re experiencing pain in the first place. Are you going to sit there and curse yourself every day or are you going to sit there and deal with it? Breathe through it. That’s my goal for the rest of my life. It’s to sit with people and help them confront and breathe through spiritual pain, emotional pain, and physical pain. Whatever it is because it is all intertwined. You can’t have one without the other. 

What people get so freaked out about is the amount of hopelessness and helplessness that they feel with chronic pain because they really do feel like they’re all alone. Nobody understands and nobody wants to look at it. You grieve your former pain free body and all the hopes, dreams, and desires that you had before chronic pain. 

You grieve the person you thought you were going to become. 

And when you heal, you get your life back, but it’s not the former life. It’s like you’re a new person. To be able to blossom out of that, you feel like a butterfly. If it’s possible for me to be pain free, anybody could be pain free. But you have to stop thinking that a doctor is going to have a prescription or a pill for it. You have to be able to expand your mind and be willing to throw whatever you can at the pain. 

What is your advice for someone who is struggling with chronic pain? 

Don’t give up. If you feel like you have tried everything, then try looking at what you have been doing that may be contributing to the chronic pain. If you’re hating on yourself and hating on your body, that has a lot to do with the fact that you’re staying in pain. At least it did for me. And I would start with asking some questions. Have I had trauma that I’m afraid to look at? Am I holding onto that trauma? I think that a lot of the time an injury is the catalyst for understanding where you are holding all of your trauma. 

Something that I just realized is that my trauma was deep self-hatred because I had a mother who hated herself so I became the ultimate perfectionist. I was not allowed to be imperfect. That’s why I felt like a failure when I had an injury that wouldn’t heal. I’ve put all this work in my whole life to be this specific type of person and now this injury is going to take me down. I didn’t have self value. I valued the things that I had worked really hard on, but I didn’t value myself. My trauma came from years and years of not being enough and always telling myself that I needed to be better. When I finally did injure myself, it stopped me because I needed to be stopped in my life. I needed to sit down and look at my life. Ultimately, it wasn’t an injury that wouldn’t heal. It was my trauma that wouldn’t let the injury heal. 

Your body is doing something for you. Your body is doing this for a reason. Get down to the root of that reason and find a healthier way for your body to process all this emotional and physical pain that you have been holding onto for so long. It takes work. One of the best ways to go within and start asking questions is to just meditate. We have active imaginations, but whatever it is that you’re shown within your mind’s eye, pay attention to that. Pay attention to those little pictures and those little movies in your mind because that’s where it begins to reveal itself.  

Your whole story is incredible. I was so excited when I met you. For those of you who are reading this, we met in a CPR class. We started talking about chronic pain and I just knew that I needed to do this interview. 

Thank you for giving me a platform to share my story. I didn’t even think that my story meant anything. So many people won’t take advice unless they really know you. Thank you for this.