My Own Story as a Skeptic Part 2

I love competition and was once one of the top gymnasts in the state of Illinois. Every sport I participated in, including golf and tennis, was performed with the precision of a gymnast.

I am still not fulfilled unless I drive a golf ball 300 yards or ace my opponent with a rocket-speed tennis serve. I also lifted a lot of weights, ocassionally until my arms turned black and blue.

By the time I was in my 20′s I had racked up my share of injuries. A fall during gymnastics landed me on my tail bone; a high-speed water skiing fall, among many other injuries, left me with back, neck and joint pain that persisted for years.

It wasn’t until I severely wrenched my right shoulder while lifting weights that I came to understand how medicine had failed pain sufferers and how Prolotherapy was a “miracle.”

After a year of failure with two cortisone injections and physical therapy to rehabilitate my shoulder, a “simple” arthroscopic surgery was performed. I was promised that I would be back to playing sports within three weeks.

After the surgery, in a story that is sadly too familiar, my shoulder became much worse. It blew up like a balloon filled with fluid. Enough so that when I walked, it sloshed.

It took a year after the surgery to return my shoulder to even the baseline pain I had experienced before the surgery. On top of this, chronic neck and back pain, and my right wrist, which had suffered years of abuse from the constant wear and tear of gymnastics, tennis and golf, was bothering me and I had a wicked case of tennis elbow. Pain was my constant companion.

Like many of my patients, I learned to live with pain. After all, I “knew” there would never be a cure.

Being in chronic pain, I did worry that I would be crippled as the pain extended to different areas of my body. Many of the injuries I suffered in my teens and twenties, which I thought were healed, revisited me, one by one.

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