My Life With Chronic Pain
I took a different approach to pain management
One afternoon in 2005, it felt like I’d been shot with a supersonic pellet gun at close range, or maybe a bolt of lightning igniting and exploding from within the disc that used to live in my spine between L4 and L5.
I dropped like a boulder, hitting the deck of the asphalt tennis court while I was warming up for a local tournament.
We can’t learn this stuff on a webinar
It just happens. My training partner and friend, a local pro at the Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale, rushed to the net asking if I was okay. Clearly, I was not, but neither of us knew what had happened.
I tried to stand up. Gravity won. I crumbled to the ground, groaning in agony. I had never felt a pain that numbed both mind and body at once. My friend helped me crawl, as best he could, to my car in the parking lot. It must have been a hundred and fifty yards.
It felt more like a mile. I got myself into the driver’s seat and reclined it as far back as possible to relieve the pain. I could barely see over the dashboard pulling out of the lot. The pain blinded me. I winced, more to endure the agony attacking my body than the harsh light of the Sonoran desert in early summer.
My ego kept me from calling an ambulance
I drove to the emergency room a few miles away. I parked the car like a kid who just got his learner’s permit, opened the door with my body’s weight, and let myself fall onto the pavement before crawling to the entrance. The doors found me on the ground, waving at the infrared sensors, and let me into a cold, full ER.
Everyone stared as I crawled through the doorway. A nurse ran toward me with a wheelchair, but sitting made the pain bad enough that I wanted to punch myself in the face. I wasn’t thinking straight. I was cold, leaning against the chair, answering questions. It felt like an eternity.
The nurse told me to wait
But waiting is against my religion. Patience is not my virtue, especially when I feel like I’ve been shot. So I crawled back to my car, drove to the drive-through liquor store next door to the hospital, and ordered three Gatorades and the largest bottle of Advil they had.
I made it the few miles home and crawled into the house, only to be met by Roxanne, our Labrador puppy, who couldn’t wait to greet me by licking my face. And I was home alone because my wife and best friend were on a road trip with our kids.
Getting to know chronic pain
Chronic pain is the most miserable kind of pain I can imagine, and I’ve got a great imagination. I had to build a working relationship with it.
I took on physical therapy as if my career depended on it, even though I wasn’t a tennis pro. I was an excessively stressed-out, overcontrolling small business owner who loved to play tennis, spend time with my family, and build my financial advisory practice.
I blamed the pain on being an athlete, not on being a worn-out business warrior in my forties—a huge wake-up call.
Chronic stress and pain are insidious by nature
I had no clue what role stress played, or how it crushes people from the inside out more than we want to admit. Until a major health issue forced the truth on me, mine did.
I had surgery the following year, in 2006. Toward the end, I lived on a blue walker my wife and I bought at Walgreens. Remember, I was a legend in my own mind, a big tennis cheese in Arizona, and here I was needing an old dude walker to get around.
I met humility
Life was hell. Chronic pain dragged me into a black hole I didn’t know existed. I couldn’t sleep well. I couldn’t eat well. I couldn’t work well or manage my business.
Pain pills made me hurl like a first-time passenger on a cruise ship that just hit a white squall. I could eat Advil and drink beer, wine, and whiskey, but none of it put a dent in the level ten pain that ate me alive. Same with weed, plus it was too expensive, hard to find, and the mere stink of it would send my wife into a terrifying battle cry.
When my back fell apart, so did the rest of my life
It took two years of intentional fitness training and physical therapy to walk normally again. I’ve never stopped working to live free of chronic pain. I never played tennis again, though I did learn to play, compete, and win at pickleball, starting at 3.5 and working my way up to 5.0 tournaments around Arizona. I also got certified to teach, but I walked away from it all.
I’ve lived with chronic pain every day since the pellet gun whacked me in the lower back and dropped me to the ground like human jerky.
Sciatica is my nemesis
Medically, sciatica is pain, numbness, or tingling that radiates along the sciatic nerve, the thick nerve that runs from the lower back through the hips and down each leg.
A herniated disc or bone spur usually causes it, pressing on the nerve root, exactly the kind of damage that blew out at L4-L5 that day on the court.
It’s more common than most people realize. Roughly 40 percent of people will deal with it at some point in their lives, and most cases ease up within a few weeks. Mine didn’t. Mine settled in for the long haul, which meant I had to find a way to manage it that didn’t involve pills, needles, or giving up on the rest of my life.
Pain can change us
The pain of my back injury profoundly changed me. Could I have gone back to tennis? Sure. Could I have taken pain meds at the risk of making a career out of jacking convenience stores? Heck, I didn’t even know what a “pain program” meant when I first herniated a disc. It’s hardcore drugs. Yuck.
Instead, I shifted my mindset into a higher gear and dialed in new priorities. The older I get, the less my ego plays a role in my choices. That’s true for all athletic activities now. I don’t need to prove anything to anyone.
I prefer to live as pain-free as I can. It’s a choice.
Since surgery, I rededicated myself to becoming the fittest version of myself now that I’m sixty-five. I’m extremely vigilant with self-training at home, on a bicycle, hiking, and great naps. I learned how to rebuild my core from chiropractor Eric Goodman’s book, Foundation: Redefine Your Core, Conquer Back Pain, and Move with Confidence.
Their premise flips the usual core workout on its head. Stop obsessing over six-pack abs and start strengthening the posterior chain, the muscles running up the back of the body that were built to hold us upright in the first place.
Simple movements, no equipment, and it works.
Self-healing isn’t selfish
The other book that helped most was Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by Dr. John Sarno. Sarno, a former rehabilitation physician at NYU, argued that most chronic back pain isn’t structural at all.
He called it Tension Myositis Syndrome, pain the brain manufactures to distract us from emotions we’d rather not feel. It all made sense looking back on my life over twenty years ago.
Stress owned me. Chronic pain pummeled me. One line of Sarno’s has stuck with me for years:
“There’s nothing like a little physical pain to keep your mind off your emotional problems.”
I read that sentence and saw my entire career staring back at me
My entire adolescent life was dedicated to banging tennis balls into a garage door, a wall, or anyone willing to hit with me. Like all adolescents, I was an emotional mess.
Winning meant feeling okay even though I seldom felt good enough. I couldn’t win enough to fill the void of not knowing myself well enough to be good enough, grateful for it all, here and now.
Rebuilding from the inside out is a process, not an event. When our health fails, and life falls apart, we have a choice: give up or fight back from the inside out. I chose the latter, because the alternative would suck.
What actually helps
Somewhere in year two of rebuilding, I stopped looking for a cure and started looking for a practice. That shift changed everything, and it’s the part I wish someone had handed me on day one.
Breathwork is the tool I reach for first, every time. Slow, deep breathing calms the nervous system that’s been on high alert since the day my disc blew out. When the pain flares, I breathe in for a count of four, hold for four, and breathe out for six. Nothing fancy. It works because it works, and it costs nothing.
Mindfulness meditation isn’t a soft, feel-good add-on either. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health points to mindfulness-based stress reduction as a first-line, non-drug approach for chronic low-back pain, the same condition I’ve lived with for over twenty years, and the American College of Physicians recommends it ahead of medication. I didn’t need a study to believe it. I needed one to explain why it was working.
The practice itself is simple, if you’ve never tried it. Instead of fighting the pain or trying to think my way past it, I sit with it. I notice where it lives in my body, whether it’s sharp or dull, whether it’s moving or holding still, and I let it be there without stacking panic or resentment on top of it. Pain plus resistance is suffering. Pain without resistance is just pain, and pain by itself is more bearable than most people expect.
Movement matters just as much. Cycling, hiking, and the posterior chain work from Goodman’s book keep my body strong enough to support the nerve that gives me trouble. Sarno’s book retrained my mind to stop manufacturing pain out of stress I wasn’t dealing with. Between the two, I built a system instead of waiting for a cure.
If you’re new to this, start with your breath. It’s the one tool no doctor can take away, and no insurance company can deny.
None of it made the pain disappear. It made the pain manageable, which is a different and, I’d argue, more honest goal.
The dance with chronic pain continues
When chronic pain knocks on my front door, and the sciatic nerve starts pinging me with shocks running from a low seven to a high nine on the pain scale, I don’t want to dance. I prefer to cycle.
So I smile, take a series of long, deep, healing breaths, the same four-four-six count that gets me through the worst of it, and let the pain be there without a fight. Sometimes it sticks around for a while. Most days now, it doesn’t stay long, and I’m okay either way.
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