On a mission to make my body a home | part 2
A few short months ago, I wrote about embarking on the most recent leg of my journey, navigating my longstanding body pain. This sore and stiff trek started in my late teens and has continued into the end of my 30s. Out of the 40 years I’ve spent living in this body, nearly two-thirds of those have been marked by physical discomfort. I’ve visited dozens of physical therapists across three different countries and have been examined by chiropractors, massage therapists, and acupuncturists. Their assessments and advice, along with my own independent research and self-correcting, have helped me to gain a greater understanding of what’s going on below the surface of my skin.
In order to finally solve this pain problem, I needed to understand it more deeply.
Aside from basic biology, I spent many years not really knowing how my homebody worked. We sang head, shoulders, knees, and toes in a singsongy voice as children to become oriented with what the major body parts were, but my schooling didn’t lead me down a path that taught me much about how those parts worked. I knew that we were much more than skin and bones, but I hadn’t reached deeper than the surface of the complex inner workings of the human body. I spent many years not being disconnected from my body.
Given that women were largely excluded from medical trials until 1993 and medical research including Black women only began in recent years, I guess this comes as no surprise. If most general practitioners didn’t grasp the intricacies of women’s bodies, how would their patients know any better? I remember PMS being used as a catch-all explanation for completely unrelated womenly issues, and if you pressed for a solution for lingering pain, a prescription would be written for heavy-duty pain meds.
When doctors attempted to prescribe me narcotics at the age of 11, after a surgery on my foot, my grandfather protested them so much that I stored the message away to steer clear of pain pills. While eavesdropping on that conversation with my mom and grandma, I didn’t fully understand everything the grown folks were saying, but I later came to learn it was the addictiveness that made my grandfather so adamant about me not taking them.
Watching Dopesick when it was released in 2021 gave renewed significance to my grandfather’s objections decades earlier and forever changed the way I related to my own body pain. Along with uncovering the manipulative, deadly, capitalist nature of Big Pharma, the show (and the book by Beth Macy it’s based on) also detailed the lengths people will go to escape their pain. It takes one slip, one fall, one accident to be inflicted with all-consuming, inescapable, tormenting sensations throughout your body, and “all it takes” to fast-track an escape from that is to pop a painkiller. Resulting in a global pharmaceutical industry that brings in $1.6 trillion in revenue, comparable to the GDP of entire countries like Mexico and Spain.
As I got sucked into the capitalism wage trap after college, I found myself suppressing my aches, pain, and discomfort so that I could maintain perfect attendance at work for at least 50 weeks out of the year. I found myself relying more and more on Motrin to silence my piercing migraines and dull my widespread back aches. My state of condition made it so that for holidays and birthdays, at least one gift bag would contain a bottle of ibuprofen and a lower-back ThermaCare heat patch. But whenever I’d squeeze down to untwist that safety cap to take out two or three tabs at a time, that hushed conversations between my three caregivers would always pop into my mind. No matter how safe or widely available these pain relievers were, I wanted to wean myself off of taking them so regularly. I didn’t want to depend on pills to get me through the day.
It wasn’t until my pivotal physical therapy experience at a hospital in Tenerife that I began to better understand what was going on inside my body. An important place to start is that everything is connected. One area of the body being misaligned can lead to other issues further down the line. A sensation felt in one part of the body doesn’t mean that’s where it originates. The body keeps the score. Even when an act that has physically or spiritually impacted us has long passed, the hurt will remain until it’s healed.
That young, friendly, soft-spoken physician validated the years, the layers, the intensity of the trauma that my body was holding. He empowered me to stop mitigating my pain. He also introduced me to techniques like dry needling that would penetrate a trigger point and instantly release the tightness and tension in my muscles. For just a few seconds, I knew what it felt like to live inside a pain-free body. The sweet relief I received through his care was a feeling I was determined to feel all the time.
For the next three years, I would chase my escape from pain through at-home, holistic care, continuing to steer clear of pain pills. I would calm migraines, muscle spasms, and body aches with hot water heat pads, electric massaging devices, and more intense stretching. Yet the pain persisted. I had yet to discover the source of the knots in my neck, nor the tension twisting through my head, or the throbbing soreness in my hips that would keep me awake. As I stepped into the final year of my 30s, I became more determined than ever to get to the root of my decades-long discomfort.
This led me to the quiet but effective rheumatologist I wrote about in my previous post. Weeks after my first appointment, the time had come to review the results of the tests and scans she had tasked me with. As I sat back down at her desk, we exchanged simple greetings without her eyes ever leaving the computer screen. She clicked and nodded as she reviewed. Since my shoulder ultrasound was done in-house, that report was visible in the system right away.
On the day the ultrasound was done, the friendly male doctor who kept apologizing for his near-perfect English instructed me to pose my right arm four different ways to examine the tendons and ligaments in my right shoulder. In the end, he informed me that he couldn’t see anything wrong. “You should check here,” he said as he put his hand on the back of his head above the neck, “there could be something there that’s causing the nerves to send pain to other areas.”
My rheumatologist’s face remained pensive as she repeated this back to me before moving on to my blood work. “You don’t have any stiffness in your hands or feet?” she asked me for the second appointment in a row. “No, not really,” I reassured her. Sometimes I do wake up in the morning with stiff hands, but this subsides after a few seconds. “You have very high markers for arthritis, but you’re not showing any of the usual symptoms,” her voice trailed off in a way that was neither a question nor a statement.
There was one more scan to review, and it wasn’t until our appointment that I realized I was supposed to bring the results with me. Most of my physicians and testing facilities are located inside my insurance company’s medical center, but there are a few services they don’t do in-house. Those are tests and scans, usually offered at a PPP (public-private partnership) hospital, that are still covered by my insurance. However, their systems don’t speak to each other. It was my task to retrieve my gammagrafia ósea (bone scan) results and bring them to my doctor. Unbothered, my rheumatologist said we could review them at my next appointment.
Given that I was missing a source of information, my ultrasound showed no signs of explaining my shoulder pain, and my blood results left us with more questions than answers, the doctor sent me off with a new task. I was given a referral to get an MRI done on my hips and set a date for my next visit. I shouldn’t be grateful that I’ve found another doctor who takes the source of my pain so seriously, but I am.
This is the third country’s healthcare system I’ve utilized in my 8 and a half years living in Europe. (Hot tip: avoid the emergency rooms in Greece.) I’ll never forget my first exam to address my back pain in Berlin and how confused I was when they told me that I could leave after seeing the doctor. I hovered at the receptionist desk, waiting for them to ask me, “Bar oder mit Karte?” (Cash or card?) As the blonde woman wearing a crisp white top looked up to wish me a good day in German, I thought, You mean, there’s no copay?
On top of having hundreds of dollars a month deducted from my paycheck for healthcare when I lived in the US, I was also expected to pay a $20-25 copay for every doctor’s visit. I’ve seen how savagely public healthcare funding is getting slashed and hear firsthand how hard it is to get access to healthcare services, especially if you’re uninsured. I fear what the defunding of public healthcare services by the “Big Billionaire Bill” will bring for everyone living in Amerika now.
In Europe, every consultation, every follow-up, every test, every scan has cost me €0 out of pocket. Even dental is included, which is a whole separate service a.k.a. cost in the US. Due to the parameters of my visa, I’m required to be a private health insurance holder in Spain. Starting in July, the monthly premium did go up to €107.35, which makes the yearly cost of caring for my health less than €1300. Compare that to the Amerikan “Affordable” “Care” Act [I’m using air quotes] that could cost someone my age over $600 a month.
Having access to this kind of truly affordable, accessible, and adequate healthcare shouldn’t be a blessing, but it is. I shouldn’t be grateful that I live in a country that doesn’t allow the private healthcare system to price-gauge gauge but I am. It shouldn’t be a privilege to have access to providers and services that help me heal my pain, but it is.
As I await my next appointment and the results from yet another test, I can feel the relief of learning more about my body, releasing a bit of tension from my muscles. With the aid of my rheumatologist, I’m confident that I’m closer than ever to truly understanding what’s going on in there. Instead of continuing to soothe the symptoms, we’re close to narrowing down the source (or sources). With all of the pieces of the puzzle that make up the inner workings of my body, we’ll have a clearer picture of exactly what the problem, and how to address it. The relief of feeling pain-free inside my homebody feels like it’s within reach, without being prescribed a bottle of painkillers to get there.