Costochondritis?

Does anyone on the board have experience with a costochondritis dx? I'm starting to wonder if that is the source of my chest pain. When I was first diagnosed with GERD in January and my primary symptom was chest pain, I assumed it was because of all the inflammation in my esophagus and stomach. Now, both my GI and I believe the chest pain is unrelated to the GERD; the pain has not responded to medication, is near-constant, and is sometimes accompanied by shortness of breath. I experience chest pain every day throughout most of the day and it is not related to what I eat; some physical activity exacerbates it (e.g., running) while some doesn't (e.g., swimming), and some nights I have to sleep sitting up, but I think that's when the GERD is also kicking in and there's a chest pain/nausea/acid reflux combo. My GI's been putting me through some cardiac workups to make sure there's nothing wrong with my heart or lungs and so far, everything looks good (EKG, chest x-ray, CT scan all normal).

At this point, after many months of daily chronic pain, I'm getting a bit frazzled. Someone on the board mentioned costochondritis previously as a potential culprit--is it a diagnosis of elimination? I wonder if I should bring it up with my GI or talk to my PCP about it. In the meantime, my GI has started me on Lyrica to hopefully help with the pain. In addition to all the chest pain, my joints have started flaring up again. Seriously, this last year has been so crappy that I would really like to think it can only get better from here.

Anyway, any thoughts would be appreciated as I try not to pull anymore hair out while yelling at my body to stop being such a you-know-what.

Before my Crohn's diagnosis, I had severe pain up under my right ribcage for months. My doctors diagnosed gall bladder problems and removed it--but it didn't lessen the pain at all. My idiot GI doctor decided that the problem was psychological and insisted that I was "killing myself with stress." But when he pressed on that area, he had to almost scrape me off the ceiling! At that point, he decided, "Oh, you may actually have something there" and diagnosed costochondritis. He sent me to a rheumatologist, who discovered that every one of the pressure points throughout my body hurt. So he diagnosed fibromyalgia and gave me muscle relaxants that made me pleasantly woozy at bedtime, but didn't help with the pain or the digestive issues one bit. When I kept complaining that the digestive issues were a hundred times worse than the joint and muscle issues, he just shrugged and told me that digestive issues are part of fibromyalgia. Eventually I stopped going to him. Within a year, I needed an emergency resection. (My primary care physician thought that I had acute appendicitis, but ordered an emergency CTscan before the surgery--which showed that I had Crohn's, not appendicitis, and needed a resection immediately.)

Crohn's presents differently in different people. Mine presented with cramps, diarrhea, and killer pain up under my right ribcage--not a typical presentation. Still, somebody should have suspected it and caught it before things got so far out of hand.