Our first day at the beach after the surgery.
How everything started.
After the surgery, I posted on Reddit about my thoracic spine injury, just in case someone, somewhere, was searching for answers like I did. I expected maybe ten people to stumble across it over years, if anyone at all.
But surprise, it turns out, isn't as rare as they'd have you believe.
Within weeks, I got hundreds of messages. Stories like mine. Stories worse than mine. People dismissed, misdiagnosed, gaslit into the wheelchair. Told their thoracic herniated discs visible on MRIs, couldn't possibly cause pain and symptoms. Diagnosed instead with fibromyalgia, anxiety or even long COVID.
I read about faces and minds twisted in agony, labeled "psychiatric." About neurological symptoms buried under prescriptions for antidepressants. About lives derailed not just by a spine injury but by, misinformation, egos, lack of knowledge and arrogance.
This isn't a war against doctors. There are excellent specialists! I'm always looking for them and I'm happy to connect to build a bridge between patients and doctors! this is an effort against the dishonest diagnosis, the refusal to look, the audacity to call pain "imaginary" even when your MRI is lighting up the disaster zone.
Pain should not be invisible. You have the right to make it visible, and you, reading this, you have the right to express yourself without being handed a psychiatric label instead of a solution. There are no magic cures for back pain, but there are options.
This space exists because no one should suffer alone, in isolation as I once did.
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