10 Tips for Managing Chronic Pain at Home

10 Tips for Managing Chronic Pain at Home: 

(Advice from a Physical Therapist and Mother of Child with Lyme, ME/CFS & POTS)

Defining Pain
Most Chronic pain suffers hate rating their pain, but health care providers need to know. Sometimes we refer to the "Pain Assessment" as the 5th Vital Sign (after Temperature, Pulse, Respiratory rate, and Blood pressure). When we're treating you for pain, your rating is the only way we can gage whether a patient is making progress or not. It's more difficult when trying to quantify how much pain a child is in. I find the Visual Analog Scale (VAS) works better than telling someone to "rate your pain on a scale of 0-10."

Four Stages of Lyme Disease: Borrelia burgdorferi

Lyme Disease is a vector borne illness caused by Borrelia Burgdorferi(Bb) a spirochete which is passed on to humans primarily by infected ticks. There are 21 known species of Borrelia and 3 genotypes of B.burgdorferi.  Ticks are small arachnids and can carry numerous bacteria, viruses and protozoa such as Rickettsia, Bartonella, Ehrlichia chaffeensis, and Babesia. The tick has a two year life cycle, going from larva to nymph to adult, requiring blood at each stage. Many bites occur during the nymph phase. The typical nymph is about the size of a poppy seed.

The Long Road to a Lyme Diagnosis

In August 2012, my daughter became critically ill. What we thought was the flu, progressed to a point where she could no longer function physically or mentally.

At the time of her illness my daughter was a straight "A" honors student and playing Water Polo. She was doing 360 sit-ups, 20 pushups and swimming for 2-4 hours every day. One day she came home from school with a flu like symptoms and a fever. After a week of her progressively getting worse, I started taking her to the doctor on a Bi-weekly basis. By the second month of her illness she could barely walk. She'd gone from Geometry/Algebra to not being able to do simple addition/subtraction. She had a laundry list of symptoms: Constant migraine type headache, extreme insomnia, extreme light sensitivity, sound sensitivity, neck/back pain, muscle/joint pain, jaw pain, extreme foot pain, extreme fatigue, shortness of breath, nausea, abdominal pain, low blood pressure, lightheadedness, as well as a recurring low grade fever that was accompanied by a diffuse rash. Later she developed reddish/purple striated marks on her back, her legs/feet would remain bluish & cold most of the time and her blood pressure would hover in the 70:50 range making her completely intolerant of any activity.  Her memory which was once sharp as a tac had disappeared. She wasn't able to walk more than ten feet without starting to black-out. School had become virtually impossible.