"I've had all I can stands, I canst stands no more"......Popeye

Since I could no longer exercise or even walk around the block, I became more sucked into my pain. I developed a new symptom. I had a sharp pain in the lower left quadrant of my abdomen. I went to my GYN.....nothing. I went to my GI doctor.....nothing. I even went to a general surgeon thinking he could do exploratory surgery. He told me there was nothing there! What was this never ending pain? I decided to visit an Endocrinologist. Hey, I had been to every other specialist around, I might as well. She was unbelievably smart. After an hour and a half consultation, she looked at me and said " I think all your problems are coming from your spine". Little did she know how right she was! I then went to see a few more neurosurgeons that said there was nothing they could do for me. Another DEAD END! I felt frustrated, exhausted and angry. I thought "not again!" The pain was unrelenting! It was beginning to beat me down. There was no getting away from it. I felt like I was losing my mind! One morning, I got dressed and went to see my GP. The nurse practitioner saw me first. I told her I could no longer handle one more day with this constant pain. I told her I had been dealing with this my whole life and that I was too old to deal with it anymore. I was almost 46 yrs old and I was worn down to the bone! I was done and at the very end of my rope. I had no more answers and no more strength to fight. They gave me some pain medication to hold me over and referred me to a Pain Specialist. I was hesitant, but I had run out of options.
A couple of weeks later I went to see a man named Dr. Chopra. He had the most compassionate face. He really seemed to genuinely care. He began to take my history. I broke down and began to cry. I had never done that before! I was truly at the end of myself. I felt completely helpless and broken and I could no longer hide behind my makeup and long blond hair. He handed me some tissues and told me that I seemed to have two separate problems. First he said that I had some type of autoimmune disease and then he looked at me and said " you need to go to the Chiari Institute". I could not believe he even knew about Chiari, let alone the Institute in NY! This doc had my total confidence. He said if I had a tethered spinal cord then they were the experts to see. For the first time in a long time I actually felt some hope. There is a scripture that reads " in our weakness, He is made strong". I knew God took the reigns of my life, because I finally gave up and dropped them.