It was an ordinary morning it was August 2018 so it it’s was almost 5 years ago and I um I had had like a bit of a nagging back pain before so this certainly wasn’t out of nowhere laara ping way is an editor at the globe and
In 2018 a simple sneeze changed her life and I was just making breakfast in my kitchen it was an ordinary morning and I sneezed and it was Electric pain in my lower back and I looked around thinking like did I just get hit with something because I couldn’t believe that this
Pain had come from within my own body that’s how kind of shocking it was that sneeze was the beginning of Lara’s chronic pain something that affects one in five Canadians but Lara thought her pain would eventually go away so in 2018 she carried on with her day you know I
Did what a busy mom uh who was on her way to uh visit her mother 4 hours away in the summer would do I took some Advil and I hope for the best and I thought surely this can’t last I had no way of knowing that this was the beginning of
Something right and so I thought okay I’m going to be uncomfortable for this car ride but then as the weekend progressed uh the pain started traveling and so it started went into my hip and then down my leg and then it was just you know it wasn’t it wasn’t a baiting
It was amplifying and I thought this isn’t great and I remember I was going on a work trip in a couple weeks and I thought oh this will be great for me because I’ll get to rest I won’t have to be a parent for 3 days and uh what
Really happened was I was stuck on a plane and I thought I can’t get up I I need to stretch I need to stand sitting hurts uh and that’s when it it kind of got serious for me I thought this isn’t normal I have to go see my
Doctor for years Laura tried treatment upon treatment to try and alleviate her pain and almost none of it worked according to one estimate the total direct and indirect costs of chronic pain was around 40 billion in 2019 and yet even with that cost and so many people dealing with the condition
Why it happens remains poorly understood so today on the show Lara tells us what it’s like trying to access care for chronic pain and about research that could offer hope for those with this Affliction I’m Mana car ramman Wilms and this is the deciel from the glob and Mail Laura thank you so much for being here thanks for having me Laura what was your life like before that sneeze I I think I was like a typical pretty active mother of two children I had been a runner all through my 20s I had dabbled in yoga and pilates virtually all my
Adult life I was an on and off gym goer and at the time of the sneeze I actually was a card holding gym membership person and I was like actively working on my core and doing all those things you think you should be doing in your early
40s uh so I was doing that um I also walked a lot I live about 2 kmers away from the GO train I would do that walk twice a day um I was going into the office every day this is pre-pandemic so I was an active healthy person uh and
Then and then with that sneeze I guess did those things change yeah absolutely so suddenly walking to the train station getting on the subway things like that started hurting um I remember sitting near the exit in trains because I wanted to be able to pop up anytime I didn’t
Want to be hemmed in because again sitting hurt so things started slowly kind of chipping away I was running with a friend twice a week in my neighborhood and I had to stop doing that obviously so I guess when did when did you realize that you were dealing with
Something more here that you were dealing I guess with chronic pain you know I I still have a problem with the word chronic pain and I actually didn’t think of myself as somebody with chronic pain until years into this when I was talking to a cooworker about writing this story about
Back pain and she said something about well you know when it becomes chronic and I said H you said the CW and I I hate that I don’t love that word my eyes kind of glaze over at that term it feels uh clinical and sterile and it doesn’t
Sound very specific uh and it’s hard to quantify so that was kind of my first thing oh yeah like I fit that definition the definition of chronic pain is pain lasting more than 3 months um and that was certainly the reality I was living in okay okay so chronic pain is
Technically pain that’s lasting more than 3 months so if this is something that’s not going away after that that’s that’s what you’re dealing with then so if you think about going to your doctor for something like acute pain so you know you you hit your knee uh you
Stubbed your toe and you need stitches that’s a cute pain that’s going to last less than S days um it’s I kind of think of it as like something’s on fire whereas product pain uh is much more almost Insidious and it’s like Embers burning Slow Burn not a fire and some
Definitions kind of go even a step further and say that the source of the pain is actually resolved and so you still live with pain even though there’s no material thing you can point to in your body as being the problem so pain is one of these things though it’s it’s
It’s hard to always know because it’s it’s invisible in a lot of ways right so I guess you know how did you handle it day to day when you were feeling that I you know I didn’t want to give it too much attention and I don’t like
Telling people because I don’t want to be defined by it but um you know in meetings at work it was certainly impossible to hide because I couldn’t sit through meetings so I would pop up and walk around and I remember a cooworker saying to me he noticed that I
Was uncomfortable and he had dealt with um shoulder pain before and he said to me you know you won’t always feel this way and at first I thought okay buddy you don’t know what I’m going through and I appreciate you know your input here but really um I took that and it
Carried me because knowing that you won’t always feel this way or believing that can really go a long way when you’re suffering did you find out what was actually causing your pain like the root of all of this yeah it was a herniated disc so that means the disc
Which has probably been kind of on the verge of herniation for years when I had sneezed it fully herniated which is kind of ruptured right and get it gets dislodged and it hits your nerve and so you have something hitting your sciatic nerve and that’s what causes pain so
What what did you try to do to relieve it like yeah what you I do well I started with the The Usual Suspects so I took over the counter pain meds Advil liquid gel is kind of my the OG pain reliever for me um even more so than
Like prescription meds and I did take prescription meds um I was taking 9 to 12 a day when things were really bad um so I went off that I had an epidural steroidal injection which is when they put a needle right into your spine and it’s basically a cortisone or uh
Anti-inflammatory and it’s meant to just kind of give you some relief I had that done twice the first time it really did work um for about 3 months it wears off that’s the problem I did Pilates I did yoga I did Chiropractic I did acupuncture I did the gym I stopped
Doing the gym I did long walks short walks no walks um and and then I did surgery uh and so I had a disectomy where they take the disc that is offending that is kind of ruptured and hitting your nerve and they remove it so technically speaking nothing would
Impeding that nerve and causing pain what can happen though and I think what did happen with me is scar tissue grew back and that also causes pain so the surgery didn’t really actually believe it I think statistically speaking my surgery would be counted as a success I
Mean nothing bad happened it didn’t make it worse um I didn’t die on the operating table I recovered I went back to work after 7 weeks but I didn’t really feel better um I couldn’t sit for 8 hours still um and so I wouldn’t personally classify that as success how did it feel
To to go through all of that kind of looking for an answer well it’s exhausting and it’s expensive right and um I’m lucky that I have kind of the means to do some of those things to go to the Cleveland Clinic for like 100 bucks for half an hour which is um you
Know a great physiotherapy place and they’re actually the ones who referred me to a pain specialist and I’m also lucky that I live in Toronto where all these things are at my fingertips even though there are wait times for those for sure um the fact of the matter is I
Have access that not everybody does have so Lara you wrote about the situation for the globe and it got a ton of responses you got emails comments like hundreds of people responded to this so I guess why do you think this story resonates with so many people well I
Think it’s because everybody Hurts or has hurt at some point in their lives and a lot of people have back pain maybe not back pain like this but who has reached their 40s without a tinge uh or kind of wincing when they got up um and so it’s almost Universal
Right um but I was also struck by a podcast that I had listened to um and it was starring somebody named Dr Rachel zoffness she’s an American pain psychologist and she said pain is everybody’s problem everybody is a pain patient and I thought oh God that’s that’s really dark right and she said
She contextualized it she said pain is the ultimate Human Condition everybody feels pain and it’s coming for everyone and I thought well that’s certainly true uh in my experience and so you know why can’t we get this right if so many people are going to experience this in
Some way shape or form we should be paying attention to it I remember thinking to myself one way to describe pain like this is it makes me kind of feral makes me the worst version of myself I mean it sounds like this was a really difficult a lot of this was
Really difficult to go through uh I guess is there something that sticks out as you know something particularly you remember then that’s really was really frustrating oh um there was tons of parenting moments that were really frustrating like not being able to kind of wrestle with your kids and pick them
Up and swing them around and and you know chase after them but my youngest son Sam was in his battery powered Jeep and he had discovered the faster gear and he started taking off down the street we live in a suburb and it was a quiet street but you know there were
Cars around and I didn’t want him to get that far away from me and so I tried to catch up with him and he couldn’t hear me and I ended up screaming at him and he finally stopped and it struck me that if something bad were to happen I
Couldn’t prevent it because I physically couldn’t move fast enough and that’s a really tough pill to swallow if you’re a parent when your number one job is keeping your Offspring Al alive and that’s taken that’s threatened that’s that’s tough we’ll be back after this message okay so after all of this
Happened you you went looking for some answers really so tell tell us what you found where does where does pain come from and and on a physical level like how how does it work when I started investigating this with like kind of a reporter’s eye um talked to Dr Karen
Davis she’s at the crumble Institute here in Toronto and she’s been studying pain for 40 years and she said pain is in the brain and that is something that I don’t think we think about right we we have pain in the knee we we touch the
Knee we have pain in the back we touch the back the hip the head um but pain is registered in the brain and that means that pain is subjective it is the same way you would you would say maybe I don’t like olives but you know somebody
Else loves them the good news about the brain is it’s uh neuroplastic and that means the brain can change and if the brain can change then pain can change and that is what gives us all hope I think about cracking the code of chronic pain is there a way to measure pain like
We just talked about kind of the the the one to 10 scale but is there a way that we use nobody it’s funny because nobody has ever in all the Specialists and doctors and practitioners that I’ve dealt with in 5 years no no body has
Ever asked me to measure my pain on a scale and I think maybe for the reasons we just talked about and that is well what does a 10 really mean right um certainly doctors will say does this hurt does this hurt does this hurt you
Know and I’ll like H you know I or I can’t bend I can’t I can’t touch my toes I can’t Flex my foot up in a certain way those kinds of things do we have any idea about like things that maybe make someone more prone to pain like why someone might get
Chronic pain and another person might not right well we do know what predisposes somebody to chronic pain but we don’t know why somebody with similar backgrounds may experience it While others so if you are um depressed um if you have um trauma in your life you’re more likely to experience chronic pain
If you have parents who had chronic pain you’re more likely to have chronic pain or or problems processing pain uh in order to understand what’s going on when someone feels pain uh what are researchers looking at right now so right now um Dr Davis at the Kemble
Institute one of her kind of big projects is mapping the brain for biomarkers of pain um what she’s looking at is MRIs of brains and she’s trying to map out markers in the brain that would indicate a possible treatment so if somebody looked at my brain and said oh
You know here’s a marker here’s a marker here’s a marker that means that Lara is more susceptible to responding to say physiotherapy or a certain drug so that hypothetically one day somebody like me could go into a pain specialist they could take a map of
My brain and say we’re going to take you down this very specific treatment path because your brain indicates that you’ll respond to that and you could skip like months and years and Untold amount of money you know and all these different therapies and all these like surgeries
And you could have this kind of dream lined approach to treating pain yeah wow so that’s the dream yeah because it sounds like like when you’re describing your journey of trying to deal with this right it’s kind of trial and air right this or that and see what works and so
This is kind of a a different way to think about it then and another thing pain specialist will tell you is that it’s bioc psychosocial and so you’re treating kind of three things at once you’re treating the biological problem the psychological problem and the social
Problem so that is to say that a lot of things contribute to pain and so if you’re not sleeping well if you’re stressed that’s that’s going to contribute to your pain um so pain is in the brain yes but your brain is taking in information from not just your body
But from other parts right like from your mood levels your sleep levels things like that that is not to say if you’re stressed out you’re going to have pain it’s to say that these things that we don’t think about or acknowledge impact your pain yeah uh how is how is
Chronic pain really treated now though I guess I think it depends on who you see so if you have a GP who is trained to treat acute pain that’s how they’ll treat you they’ll give you a painkiller and Away you go right if they know of a
Specialist maybe they’ll refer you to a pain specialist and I think in that case you’d have a much higher level of success because they’ll be looking at the bioc psychosocial profile right and they’ll be taking taking into account all those factors that could be contributing to your pain and sometimes
It is just in your body sometimes it is like you know nerve pain that can be treated surgically or uh with medicine but there is so often something else at play there Laura this is just something I’m I’m wondering about because uh you know we we know that women’s pain in
Particular is often not believed right there have been the studies about gender bias and pain assessment uh so I guess I’m just wondering how how does that fit into this conversation uh so the Canadian pain task force issued a report a couple years ago looking at all the
The people who are vulnerable to pain and they found that women racialized people and seniors um are more likely to have a bad outcome with chronic pain um also if you live in a rural area in Canada you have to you have to consider access right um how easy it is for you
To to get Specialized Care it’s it’s so interesting because we’re talking about how this is kind of misunderstood and and diagnosed differently with by by different Healthcare Providers but like isn’t pain such a huge part of health care right like that’s often why you go to the doctor something is hurting right
Especially back pain it is staggering how many people go to see their GP for back pain right so why is why is pain so misunderstood because people don’t understand the brain the brain is a big mystery I think and also because the way it’s taught in medical school so that’s
Changing now um but you know there’s that famous stat that veterinarians have better training in pain management than medical doctors dealing with humans and that is true it’s changing but doctors are trying to put out fires right and I think of chronic pain as kind of smoldering Embers you know not this big
Blaze right and so it Demands a different kind of treatment that not all doctors are prepared for and think about how overwhelmed our healthare system is think about what our family doctors are dealing with right now how can we expect them to have all the answers so for
People suffering from Pain chronic pain in particular in Canada what are the hurdles for them to to get treatment today uh wait times for sure um and also if you think for instance something like physiotherapy or massage therapy or acupuncture is going to work for you
That’s all out of pocket right um You have to pay for that and it’s timec consuming if you work shift work and you don’t have sick days think about kind of the personal cost that that takes um so there are certainly a lot of barriers for everyday
Canadians I guess what what could we do to make things better is is there stuff in the system that we can change what what have experts told you about that it’s like anything I think the more you know so if we talk about it right and that is starting to happen happen
There’s like these portals for pain online and and it’s being taught in medical schools and things like that that’s not going to help you if you have a doctor who’s been practicing for 45 years or 30 years or 25 years right they’re not new medical grads but I do
Think that is changing um and also the the who is now calling chronic pain of disease right so it’s being recognized I think in a way now that maybe it wasn’t before yes it is a medical condition in and of itself that can be divorced from an actual physical ailment or something
Right you can say I have chronic pain and that’s it the end of story we we talked about your your pain for quite a while now but but how how are you doing now so much better um certainly nowhere near the day of the sneeze although I have to say just
Recently I must have done something and I’ve kind of had a little bit of a setback like a little bit of a flare in my back ban I’m wearing running shoes right now and that’s always always a Telltale sign that I’m not feeling awesome but I’ve learned that health is
A delicate condition and it can be snatched from you at any moment um and so that’s a that’s been a big lesson Laura thank you so much for being here today thanks for having Me that’s it for today I’m man ramman Wims our producers are meline white Cheryl Sutherland and Rachel Levy McLaughlin David Crosby edits the show Adrien Chong is our senior producer and Angela Penza is our executive editor thanks so much for listening and I’ll talk to you tomorrow
One in five Canadians suffer from chronic pain. According to one estimate, in 2019 the direct and indirect costs of chronic pain totalled $40-billion. And yet, the affliction is poorly understood and accessing treatment through the health care system can be tedious and frustrating.
Lara Pingue is an editor at The Globe. In 2018 her life changed when a sneeze sent her spiralling into the world of chronic pain. On her years-long journey, she’s dealt first-hand with the health care system, she’s tried multitudes of treatments to help alleviate her pain and she’s learned about the research currently being done to figure out this mysterious affliction. She’s on the show to explain her experience and what her bad back taught her about the world of chronic pain.
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