I ve been having a tough year and a half... I had pneumonia in February last year(2013) where I was hospitalised. I won t get into details of what happened there but I started experiencing chest pain when I was discharged. I went to my gp who didn t believe me and after a few weeks said to my face you re lying . I didn t go back. In April we did two very fast moves (in three days, and the second move was to a different country) and I was given a new gp. He was more willing to help me but was stuck as in he couldn t figure out what was wrong with me. We tried a lot of different painkillers, a lot of them knocked me out for a few hours and then I was still in the same amount of pain. Months passed and the pain increased. My doctor put me down as chronic in May. I went home to visit my family in my home country during the summer where I got even worse and ended up going to the doctor I saw before moving to live with my husband. He diagnosed me with Tietze s Syndrome and started me on Prednisolone 40 mg that I were to decrease every week by ten mg until I was down to zero. It worked like a miracle and I was feeling so much better! I went back home and informed my gp of what happened and he accepted the diagnose but kept calling it costochondritis instead, I realised later that there wasn t that much of a difference in between the diagnoses, but kept me on the treatment I was on. Then catastrophe struck (in my opinion) and I was up all night vomiting. An ambulance was called and the crew gave me morphine to deal with the pain. At this point I was crying almost nonstop and kept speaking my first language rather than English. My pain didn t decrease so they gave me another dose, then another s in the bus as we were heading to the hospital and then another one when I was taken in to hospital. The doctors there put me nil on mouth for 24 hours. We (my husband and I) asked for a translator but was not provided one. The next day in hospital I passed out from the pain and when I came to a staff member, I don t know if he was nurse or otherwise, was shouting at me for not answering when he called and pressed on my chest. I was screaming in pain and when a doctor finally came she eventually put me back on Prednisolone. But 1mg. The third day in the afternoon I had been moved for the third time and I had had enough. So I put my foot down and demanded that they provide me of the translator that I had asked for when I came in, phone my mother and phone my doctor in my home country. They replied by discharging me thirty minutes later and put me back on the dose of Prednisolone that I had been on when I went in along with some extra painkillers. It didn t take a week for me to realise that the effect of my treatment wasn t the same as when I had initially been given it. It took a few months before things got kick started for me and I was referred on to the pain clinic. Then Christmas came and I had a mental breakdown due to social events that I d rather not go through and I spent the entire Christmas holidays and New Years unable to deal with more than three people in a room before having a fast oncoming panic attack. The pain clinic decided to give me injections which I received only a month and a half after seeing the consultant. I was now in March of this year (2014). The treatment s effect was almost instantaneous and I was able to get out of bed on my own for the first time in over 6 months. We re now in May and I ve been granted a second treatment but have to wait until September for it. I have had a few bad days since the treatment, instead of constantly bad days which is good in my opinion, and unfortunately due to a hospital visit two weeks ago I ve had near constant high pain again. The hospital visit was due to an asthma attack which got my costochondritis to flare up again. I was thankfully discharged the same day and was asked to take it easy. A week ago on Monday my husband and I were asked to move out which is not only causing a lot of stress but also a lot of anxiety and I have to fight a lot so I don t fall apart every day but I don t have a lot of strength left. What I would want to do is to get back to work, be able to have some kind of sex life without having to be unable to do anything for the next three consecutive days, and get back to the weight I was before this all began. Are these things possible to get back to again and is it possible to have any kind of idea of how long it would take?
Thanks for your question on Chat Doctor. I can understand your concern. Thanks for the detailed history. In my opinion, you should not worry much about this as Costco Chat Doctor.  Only