You are not alone

Please do not think that you have to live with chronic pain for the rest of your life. If someone would have told me 15 years ago that one day I would be running again and training with weights and climbing up mountains I would never have believed them! But here I am today doing exactly that!

My name is Shaheen Jaffary and I am 53 this year and feel fitter and healthier than I did in my 20s and 30s! I am here to briefly tell you my story to provide hope for you that there IS light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how long you have been in pain.

I was a very active teenage, participating in many activities such as gymnastics, aerobics, jogging, weight-training etc and was generally quite fit and well.

At the age of 19, whilst vacuuming one day, I bent over to move an object and suddenly – my back went out! I froze – locked in the most intense pain I had ever experienced! I was frightened as I had no idea what had happened but all I knew was that I could not move without feeling excruciating pain.

I recall being taken to the hospital in an ambulance, then hours later, after undergoing just a physical examination, returning home, feeling distressed and scared after having been diagnosed with a ‘slipped disk’, armed with a bag full of painkillers and advised to take full bed rest. That’s it! That was the start of a whole chapter of my life as a person with a ‘bad back’. I remember thinking “I am so young. How could I have a degenerated spine?” but I put it down to my  activities of running and aerobics and assumed I damaged my spine from overdoing them.

Battling with pain for 21 years

Over the next 21 years I battled with intermittent pain, not questioning the inconsistencies. The pain would move around the body, from one side to the other, from my lower back to my buttocks to my hips, sciatica in one leg then in the other. Then there were days or weeks when I was pain free. Other days when I was plagued with tension headaches and a lot of anxiety.

Over the course of this period I was also involved in 2 car accidents where I believed I sustained whiplash and was told by my doctors that my back had been further damaged from the impact of the car accidents.

I stopped doing many things due to my back pain believing I would further damage my spine if I engaged in them. I visited osteopaths, chiropractors, had acumpuncture, physiotherapy, engaged in so called back strengthening exercises as I was advised by these therapists that my lower back muscles were weak. I even succumbed to horrendously painful epidural injections in my spain. All to no avail.

To be sure I got relief from these treatments but only for a period of time. The pain would always return, sometimes mildly and at other times wreak havoc in my life.

For years and years I learned to just manage the pain with a combination of pain medication and alternative treatments.

I could only sit in special chairs at work and home and sleep in orthopedic beds and the fact that I was riddled with pain when I slept in a non-orthopoedic bed only reinforced my belief that my back was damaged and required these.

Moving to Dubai

When we moved to Dubai in my 30s we went through a massive upheaval in our lives and I struggled to manage my back pain with 3 young children that I was homeschooling. I never stopped to correlate my intense stress levels with my debilitating back pain.

I finally underwent an MRI scan in Dubai at the age of 39 when I was almost a cripple and could barely function properly due to the pain, the spasms, the excruciating sciatica with no longer any relief from my pain ,meds. The orthopoedic surgeon showed me the MRI scan and explained that I had a severely herniated disc at L4-S1 and that the bulging disc was leaking fluid and pressing on nerves causing my horrendous sciatica. He advised in no uncertain terms that I needed back surgery to fix this immediately and if I declined I would pretty much be whellchair bound within a few years! Suffice to say I left the hospital with a new level of pain after learning this and intense levels of anxiety!

I researched back surgery and after reading about the many horror stories of others for whom it had not resolved but only worsened their back pain, I decided against it.

It was then during this online research I came across the genius work of the late Dr John Sarno, based in America and I immediately ordered his Healing Back Pain book. Like many others I saw myself on every page. I sobbed my heart out as it all started to make sense. My whole life with its stressful challenges right from childhood and throughout my adult years and my own personality traits of perfectionism and non-confrontational behaviour, being highly driven and overly conscientious as well as the fear and worry surrounding the pain  were all factors that had led to the onset and continuance of my pain symptoms. I was willing to visit Dr Sarno for help but was unable to arrange this so instead I visited a Dr in the UK who followed Dr Sarno’s protocol in helping people to recover from chronic pain.

I will always remember that journey for my first appoinmtnet travelling on train, crippled with pain that I could barely sit still for a minute. During the consultation, which did not even involve any physical examination but only the completion of a detailed questionnaire following my life events and behavioural pattherns , I simply asked the Doctor Will I ever get better? And he calmly but quite assuredly replied ‘It seems like you have been carrying your mothers and others pain all your life. Yes you can get better’. Literally, within the next 20 minutes or so my pain dropped from a 10 out of 10 to about a 7  as a wave of relief and hope flooded me and I sobbed my heart out in front of him.

My Recovery Journey

That was the start of my recovery journey. I viewed my pain in a different light from then on. I worked on the mind body programme and within 2 weeks I saw significant  relief in my symptoms. I returned to my family in Dubai and continued with his strategies and within probably less than 3 months I was pain free!! For myself and everyone that knew me and had witnessed my debilitating condition it was like a miracle!

That was 15 years ago. That is what motivated me to change my career in Education to the Health profession and 4 years ago I trained to be a clinical Reflexologist and then a SIRPA Practitioner which enables me to help others with chronic pain and stress-induced illnesses to get better and reclaim their lives.

So I will finish as I started. Please please do not think you have to live with chronic pain forever. The latest Pain research now informs us that the cause of the vast majority of chronic pain  and  other persistent symptoms is not due to a structural problem in the body but a dysregulated (oversensitised) nervous system and conditioned neural pathways which are reversible. So the good news is that if this is the cause of YOUR chronic pain or chronic symptoms then there is every chance you too can recover as I did!

Shaheen kindly shared her story in a live Q&A on the SIRPA Facebook page and answered the viewers questions. You can watch the replay below.

Shaheen talks about her experience of chronic pain that moved around her body for 21 years and how she avoided spinal surgery and made a full recovery.

Join people who have found relief through the SIRPA approach to chronic pain.