any ideas?

Hi justme,

Welcome to HW, this is a really great place to come for support & ideas. Unfortunately, I don't have any experience with your conditions, although there have been a fair amount of post about costo recently. I'm not a doctor (in fact I'm just a couple years older than you), but I don't see why everything you have gone through can't be related. Even though we know a lot about the body & medicine, we certainly don't know everything. There are a fair amount of us on here who suffer from pain that was initially started by an injury, etc, but the pain has continued on & the doctor's can't give us a specific diagnosis, they just give us theories at best (unfortunately, I'm one of those people) because either we don't know enough or our instruments aren't sensitive enough to register the problem. There are other people who have completely unexplained pain & no one knows why. Have you talked to your doctor about these conditions possibly being related? I don't know if there are any tests that you could look into that could explain all or some of the things that you have gone through, but it might be worth looking into.

I wish I could take your pain away, take all of our pain away, but unfortunately it isn't that easy. Pain is a pretty complex thing. It would be so much easier if everyone's pain was the same & everyone's pain responded the same! Have you looked into seeing a pain management doctor (PM)? They not only prescribe meds (although from what I've learned, some don't), but they do procedures like nerve blocks & injections for pain relief. Maybe something like this would be helpful to you. These docs also tend to know a lot more about pain & treating pain than pcp's do (although that isn't always the case).

I know how frustrating it can be not to have an answer & how horrible it is to live with constant pain! I wish I could help more, but as I said, I don't know any specifics about your conditions. Hopefully someone with some more experience that me will come along and respond to you. I hope you are able to find some answers & get some relief. Keep posting.

Skeye

Hi guys thanks for your support and suggestions!!!

i have an appointment with my doc next week, so hopefully ill get some more answers! i also have physio aswell to try and find out more out the pain, aswell as rehab, because i havent been aloud to do any form of exercise incase it triggers something. but with the rehab ill hopefully get back into a regime, however at the same time its painful and hard to take deep breathes. (this is partially coz of being unfit and tired, but also because of bad posture as i was a national swimmer in which i have broad shoulders and back muscles) lol 

ill keep you updated and hopefully ill start to improve this yr!!!

x

Yh i hope it goes soon.

i feel like i cant pick myself up sometimes, specially having all these problems in one go!

do you think it is a underlying cause, because of what iam still experiencing or do you think its just my body working overtime to fight everything at once!

the pain i get seems to be exactly what i got from the costochondritis and the pericarditis because of the position? but because pericarditis was ruled out, could i still have costochondritis? how long does it last for?

i have tried paracetamol, diclofenac, cocodamol, ibruprofen , naproxen, plenty of times throughout the yr, any other ideas that can relieve pain?

x

Skeye,

wow, how long did you swim for? how did you destroy your shoulders?

i was a swimmer for 12 yrs and national standard for 6 yrs! i had to stop coz my mum was ill.

Justme x

I hope you are able to find some answers & get some relief

Oh neat! Congrats! It's too bad that we both had to stop. It's a wonderful sport. And I agree, I'm nowhere near being in the shape that I was when I swam & I doubt I ever will be b/c of the same reasons as you.

I take it your, from Great Britain then? I'm from the USA. I've known some Olympians as well (my sister used to be best friends with a girl who swam on one of the US Olympic relay teams in Sydney & won gold), but she wasn't as good as Rebecca Adlington! She never made it individually (although she was a sprinter, not distance). But most of the people who I used to race who were at that level, came close to making the team, but just missed it by a couple of spots. What did you used to swim? I was a distance freestlyer, although I morphed into a sprinter during my final years in high school, since I could no longer swim distance (not that any of the US high school events are really true distance events, maybe the 500 (yd), but that's as long as the races get in HS -- don't know if it's the same in the UK).

Good luck with figuring out what's going on with you! I know how frustrating it can be not to have a definitive answer about what is wrong!!! Keep us posted. And any time you want to talk swimming, I'm around. I miss it so much, so it's always nice to have someone to talk to (esp since we have to through similar situations, in terms of being forced to quit).

Skeye

Oh wow, that is awesome! You came really close! I raced in both yards and meters. United States Swimming has two seasons; yards is in the fall/winter (it's referred to as "short course" & you race in a 25 yd pool), and meters is in the spring/summer (it's generally an olympic size pool, although every once in a while you'll race in a pool that is 25 meters, so this season is called "long course" after the 50m pool). High school swimming is all in yards. I was lucky enough to swim for a team for a long time that had a moveable bulkhead in the pool, so the pool could be easily converted from meters to yards. The 400 IM is a fun event! I used to swim that a lot too. I was pretty all around as well, although distance was my favorite -- you just have to "get into it" or it can be a boring race. It sounds like I'm only a year older than you.

My shoulders are okay now. They definitely have limitations (and I can't swim much anymore), but as long as I am careful with lifting, etc., I am okay. The CP that I am suffering is actually eye pain. I had a pretty traumatic injury several years ago to one of my eyes & I have since developed a very rare inflammatory condition behind my eye (or so we think, like you, I actually don't have a concrete answer since nothing really shows up on MRI's, etc) that is next to impossible to treat. Thanks for the well wishes, I certainly need them! I hope your appointments this week go well!

Skeye

Post Edited (skeye) : 1/6/2009 7:09:25 PM (GMT-7)

I can relate to the bad posture. That contributed to my shoulder problems & took me several years to (mostly) correct (I still have a bad habit of slouching sometimes). I'm sorry to hear that your back exercises hurt your chest, but hopefully if you stick with them for a little while, they will loosen up your back & may even help your chest by opening it up thanks to the increased mobility of your back.

Skeye