PAULA REGAN was left with what is commonly called “a bad back” after she fell down the stairs 10 years ago. She suffered with mild pain for the next couple of years which did not affect her life too much. Then one day, she stood up from a chair and her back locked. The pain was so agonising, she could barely walk.
It took five years and multiple trips back and forth between different specialists before she was finally diagnosed with chronic pain and started on treatment.
“For five years, nobody could tell me what was wrong and I felt I would never be fixed. That was a very bad time for me, I was in an awful lot of pain all the time,” says Regan (37).
“There were days I just cried and cried and my husband would come in from work and find me in a ball on the sofa. It was just the sheer hopelessness of it. At that stage, I had given up my job and needed help getting in and out of the car.”
When she became pregnant five years ago, she was contacted by the RTÉ programme Health Squad which wanted to look at how an expectant mother with chronic pain would cope.
Her pain was at its worst at this stage and, looking back, she wonders if she would have gone ahead with the pregnancy if she had known just how much of an “absolute hell” it was going to be for her.
The Health Squad team brought Regan to a pain management clinic at St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin where, for the first time, a doctor examined her and said, “I think I know what’s wrong with you.”
She recalls: “I felt a mixture of relief and also anger that no other consultant or my GP had picked up on my chronic pain and sent me here, and it took a TV programme to do it.
“They found I had damaged a nerve when I fell and was suffering from neuropathic pain, which did not show up on any scans.
“After the baby was born, I had a procedure to burn off the nerve endings in the damaged area of my back to stop them sending pain messages to my brain, and this reduced my pain levels by about 50 per cent.”
While Regan has had to give up her passions of choir and amateur dramatics, as both require her to stand up for a long time, she is at least able to lead some kind of a normal life now.
She is sad that she can’t get down on the floor and play with her five-year-old daughter, Laura, like other mums, and tht she was unable to bring her to the park when she was younger, but they do enjoy quality time sitting on the sofa, reading stories and watching TV together.
MICHELLE McDONAGH
