How One Couple Works Together to Conquer Chronic Back Pain

What the back pain feels like
Jan: The muscles are grabbing and I can feel them starting to twist. I feel like a pretzel. Every time you take a step it just grabs, like a muscle spasm.

There's something about back pain, how it seizes your nervous system at a certain point. When I have pain in my knee or my shoulder, the pain is local. Back pain takes over your whole body.

Facing up to a chronic condition
Bill: I think Jan has always been a fairly intense person, but I think she was always pretty happy. I think she began to stress about this about a year and a half in, when we realized it wasn't a temporary thing and we didn't know how to fix it. I think she became more desperate, and I think that's a big thing to take on when you're a full-time mother with three kids and a traveling husband. It made her less happy-go-lucky.

Jan: My uncle, who's a doctor, sent me this article when he heard my back was still bothering me. I swear I started bawling. Basically the article said how difficult this is to diagnose, even for people who are extremely well schooled in medicine. Eventually you have to become your own advocate and solve it.

But I don't want to spend my life on it. My husband doesn't want to spend his life on it. My kids don't want to spend their lives on it. Nobody wants to talk about this 24/7, and it seemed like that's what you'd need to do.

What falls on Bill's shoulders
Bill: There are two aspects, the physical and the emotional. The physical is fairly easy. I mean taking the groceries out of the car, doing stuff with the kids that requires physical stuff. Chores, everything that Jan probably could have done before, fall on me. That part's easy.

Emotionally, that's where the real tough part is. You wish you could do more. You feel helpless. I'm not a doctor. I wish I could do more to help her. But it's frustrating because you feel like you can't. And she can be upset and angry. Her mood swings are pretty big.