Kelly Corry, 47, has had another bad night. "I woke up crying, and ended up on the toilet at 2 a.m. writhing in pain," she says. "Last night I thought, I can't do this anymore."
With a medical history checkered with numerous bouts of inflammation-related illnesses, Kelly could be chronic pain's unwitting poster child. The resident of Hillsdale, Ont., is among the estimated one in three Canadians who endure chronic pain, typically described as noncancer pain lasting longer than six months, or beyond the usual time for recovery. Kelly's pain has lasted more than 20 years.
Unlike a decade ago, now sufferers like Kelly have more treatment options to relieve constant, unremitting pain – from acupuncture and yoga to meditation and tai chi, as well as an ever-widening array of traditional pain management techniques.
Welcome to the new mind-body paradigm of chronic pain management.
How it started
Kelly's medical problems began when she was in her early 20s, shortly after the birth of a second healthy daughter. A third pregnancy ended in miscarriage, and then she developed vulvodynia, a pain caused by inflammation of the vulva, and interstitial cystitis, a bladder inflammation. "Any time there would be urine in there, it would just burn and burn," says Kelly. Next came gallbladder pain, which led to the removal of her gallbladder. Excessive menstrual bleeding and severe abdominal pain drove her to seek a hysterectomy.
Back in the mid-1990s, there wasn't much anyone could do for Kelly's intense bladder pain. Her doctors gave her narcotics and suggested that she move out west where the drier climate might help. So she and her family moved to Calgary. It was a stressful chapter for Kelly and her husband and their then-teenage daughters. And it wasn't a solution: in Calgary, Kelly had an operation to remove her bladder (she now wears a bag on her stomach that collects urine). The operation didn't completely alleviate the pain; she relies on three doses a day of OxyContin, a powerful narcotic, to do that.
Her marriage survived the pain and strain, though, and she and her husband returned to Ontario. Recently Kelly had another setback: she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a progressive neurological disease, while still battling vulvodynia.
Kelly's story echoes that of other Canadians. An SES Research survey conducted last October found that 16 per cent of respondents reported living in constant pain, while 20 per cent experience pain on a daily basis.
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