| In 1982 I was
driving home through the rush hour when the driver of a
72-seater coach, travelling in the opposite direction, lost
control of his vehicle and collided with my van head-on. We
had both been traveling at 40mph. I have suffered constant
pain and discomfort ever since.
I suffered multiple injuries in
the crash, the most long-term of which was a severed right
ankle. The ankle was put back on with some good surgery and
seven stainless steel screws. It has been in pain ever since.
A pain in my lower back and left hip didn’t ever go away
either and this pain has gradually increased in intensity over
time. |
Duncan Mortimer
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As the years passed
the pain became more nagging and persistent. It was affecting my
mobility, my concentration at work; my family life at home and
increasingly disturbed me in my sleep.
The first and last thing I was aware of when waking up and
going to sleep was the pain.
The constant pain is exhausting and it has lowered my immune system
so much so that in 1987 I was hospitalized with a serious bought of
pneumonia.
By 1990 I had
attended two different pain clinics at two different hospitals and
had undergone a 6-week rehabilitation course. At the time it seemed
to me that the doctor’s logic was that if I tried hard enough to
walk and live as though the pain didn’t exist, the pain would
somehow miraculously go away.
Living with yearly hospital CT scans, daily painkillers,
anti-depressants and sleeping pills I lived an uncomfortable but
grateful life, which soon became ‘the norm’. I became adept at
balancing being active with how much ‘pay-back’ time I would
spend laid up. For example, a day out with my family could put me in
bed for days at a time.
Our three children
were all quite young when I had the first accident and so they too
grew up with a degree of acceptance of the way I was living; with
constant pain and tiredness. For them this meant many periods of
‘grumpiness’ for no apparent reason.
By 1995 the pain
had increased enough to restrict my movement so much that a slight
twist or bend would create a pain like somebody sawing at the top of
my thighbone with a hacksaw whist prodding a hot poker into the base
of my spine. I was using a walking stick and crutches on a good day
and a wheelchair on my many bad days. My concentration was affected
to the degree I could no longer do my job in a consultancy office
and I was forced to retire on the grounds of ill health.
I had now been
attending hospitals on a yearly basis having CT and MRI scans but
the results were always the same. “Other than wear and tear on
your lower back, there really isn’t anything to suggest you should
be in this amount of pain.”
In 1996, following
an Isotope scan at Stanmore Orthopedic Hospital, I was involved in a
high speed accident on the M25 London Orbital Motorway and my car
rolled several times before coming to rest on it’s roof beside the
road. The sunroof crushing onto my head lacerated my scalp so much
that I required a ‘scalp rotation’ and plastic surgery to around
20% of my scalp.
Following my recovery of this accident, my hip and back pain
increased and I began using my wheelchair ‘full time’.
By this time I had little choice as my hip and back would not
take my bodyweight and I now also had a new pain to contend with in
the form of healing skin grafts on my head.
In 1997, my wife and I moved to a bungalow on the south coast where
we enjoyed fresh surroundings and new friends.
After a year by the
coast I felt the need to be seen by the hospital again and I was
given another MRI scan that still showed no apparent reason for my
condition. And although we never said it, we had both now accepted
that this was how it was going to be.
In November 2001 I
was listening to Bill Buckley’s radio show on BBC Southern
Counties Radio. He was talking to a South African couple that were
visiting the UK to let people know about a technique they had
developed called Body Stress Release. Ewald Meggersee described how
he too had lived for years with diagnosed pain and how with the
help of his wife Gail, they developed their gentle technique; a
complementary medicine that assisted the body in it’s own powerful
ability to heal itself.
Bill Buckley had
described how he had suffered from a very painful tennis elbow for
many years and had been to see BSR practitioner, Paul Masureik in
Surrey and he had helped Bill’s body to heal the affected elbow.
| I know the sort of
pain Bill was talking about and when Bill began enthusiastically
banging his elbow, I was intrigued. Two weeks later I travelled,
with my wife, the 90 miles to Lightwater in Surrey to visit Paul
Masureik.
Paul is a softly
spoken modest man with an ability to put you completely at ease
within moments of meeting him.
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I squeezed my wheelchair into his treatment room and he was
very soon describing to us, the basic logic behind the technique and
what it was he was planning to do.
My
wife, Theresa, helped me onto the special tilting bed; so designed to
transfer clients to the lying position without undue effort and
there followed my first release.
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The treatment was akin to a very gentle massage that started and
continually returned to the lower back.
Paul was using my legs as a
biofeedback to locate lines of tension and stress in my body.
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You must appreciate
that I have lived with pain for so, to help my body cope, my back
shoulders and neck were all now used to being locked in tension. At
night I would often be woken by spasms running down my legs and
complete numbness down my side.
My point is, that when I lay on
Paul’s treatment bed my body was so taught you could have plucked
a tune on my muscles.
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Leaving Paul’s
house following my first BSR release, I felt tired. I still had
pain. Too much pain to drive my car (which has hand controls). As we
neared the end of our journey home back to the coast, I
became extremely tired, but also very, very relaxed.
When I woke the
following morning I felt like a different person. I still had pain,
but because I felt so relaxed I found to a certain extent I could
now ignore the pain. This was a new sensation for me. For the rest
of that week I didn’t need to take any sleeping tablets and I
slept soundly.
| This doesn’t
sound much and if you haven’t experienced constant pain for a
prolonged period, it will be difficult to appreciate what a “life
turning” moment it was to feel relaxed in my body and to be able
to ignore the pain for a while.
The idea was to release
any tension and stress in my body so that it could start healing
itself and that rest, and my usual medication, assisted in this process.
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For the next 3
weeks we made the 180mile round trip to Surrey for a release.
Although the first 3 releases had been painful and uncomfortable, I
had begun to notice the benefits of having a relaxed body. On the 4th
release I left the bed with significantly lower pain levels in my
back and hip. I experienced waves of tingling running from my neck
down to my feet.
I soon then felt
strong enough to experiment with allowing my legs to take my body
weight and by the 6th release I was occasionally
standing, allowing my hip to take my weight.
My recovery is
ongoing and I am experiencing a wide range of emotions. I can feel
very anxious one day and completely relaxed another. My legs
desperately want to stand and feel weight on them but my body
prevents such action by sending me waves of tiredness over me.
I can feel my body responding to the technique Paul is using on my
spine but when asked what this feeling is like, I find it difficult
to describe.
A release may only take around 30 minutes and not every release is
the same, but each release does leave you feeling extremely relaxed.
Not every release eases the pain straight away and it can be days
before you realize that the pain intensity levels have decreased.
Over time, however, the affect is plain to see.
My wife, my son and
my daughters have all started to comment on how different I have
become and this has helped me to realize that this isn’t some kind
of dream and that my life really is now changing after so many years
of discomfort. I had forgotten what it was like to be without pain
and so when the moments come, where the pain levels drop to almost
zero, I can do no more than sit and smile because being relaxed and
having no pain is just the greatest feeling ever!
It really is a feeling of being ‘re-born’.
On the evening of
22nd December 2001, five days after my 7th
release, I was woken in the night by pain. A violent, sharp pain
that doubled me up from my sleep. I was thrown into a sitting
position and in a bid to comfort the area of pain; I instinctively
put my hand to my hip as I had done for so many years before. But
the pain has always been too deep for me to reach and I could never
quite touch the pain. But this night was different. When I grabbed
my hip, I ‘felt’ the pain. To put it another way, the pain
responded to me touching my hip. I could actually push at the centre
of the pain and change its intensity. I had never experienced such a
thing with this hip pain before. It has always, since the early
nineties, been deep ‘inside’ and untouchable.
This event took
place in the dead of night and took no more than about 12 seconds,
but the moment is burnt onto my mind and I can clearly recall each
one of those 12 seconds; before I fell back into a deep sleep.
I woke in the morning with very little pain.
On 23rd
December I had my first, what I have now come to call, ‘day
trip’. For the first
time in many years I was able to experience an almost ‘pain
free’ morning, being able to stand for periods as long as 10
minutes before being asked by my body to sit!
I have missed a
couple of week along the way because of being too ill to travel. I
am now due my 12th release and since that day in December
I have had 4 such ‘day trips’ each one lasting a little longer
than the last.
| I still experience
pain in my lower back and occasional deep nagging pain in my hip,
but the quality of my life has changed beyond recognition.
I don’t
foresee me being able to ‘hang-up’ my wheelchair, but I am
looking forward to working with Paul on a long term basis to see if
we can help my body to overcome the trauma’s of the past twenty
years and turn my standing into a walk and my walk into a run.
- Watch this
space!
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Paul
Masureik is very supportive of his clients and educates them in the
ways of the body!
He is happy to be at the end of the phone for clients if and when
they feel the need.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for the amazing
improvement in my quality of life. - Thanks Paul.
Duncan Mortimer
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