Unexplained Chronic Pain Had Me Hoping for a Cancer Diagnosis
/By Crystal Lindell
Having chronic pain that can’t be diagnosed or explained will take you to some pretty messed up places mentally.
I had my first mammogram this week, and I have to confess something: Part of me was secretly hoping it came back positive for cancer.
It didn’t. I’m fine. Everything was normal.
But the chronic pain I have in my ribs is just a few centimeters under my right breast, so deep down, I was kind of, sort of, hoping that maybe the cause of the pain that’s plagued me for 13 years was actually a slow moving breast cancer the whole time.
I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense. But my pain also doesn’t make a lot of sense.
At least breast cancer would be treatable.
The official medical diagnosis for the pain in my ribs is “intercostal neuralgia,” which is literally just medical jargon that translates to “rib pain.”
Yes, the pain in my ribs is “rib pain.”
There is no cure for intercostal neuralgia. I’ve tried every possible treatment. So now I just manage it with a cocktail of substances ranging from morphine to Advil.
There’s also no official cause, at least not in my case.
The best theory my doctors have come up with is that it’s a delayed reaction to me having my gall bladder taken out in 2008. The only issue there is that I had my gall bladder taken out five years before the pain suddenly started in 2013.
Taking things one step further, the doctors believe I am more susceptible to intercostal neuralgia because I have hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS). I got that diagnosis in 2018. And so far, that’s as close as I’ve come to anything tangible.
Yes, it was nice to finally have something more specific than “rib pain” to point to. At least there was some sort of underlying cause.
Finally, my chronic, hard-to-manage, some-days-totally-debilitating pain was kind of, a little bit explained. EDS created the perfect environment for nerve damage to appear five years after my gall bladder surgery.
Fine. Yes. It’s probably that. They think.
None of the doctors will ever say that they know it’s that. It’s all just a theory. There’s no scan that shows intercostal neuralgia, no blood work panel. It’s just their best guess.
The thing is, the pain is so specifically located that I can point to exactly where it is. The best way I know to describe it is that it kind of feels like there’s a jagged marble lodged under my right breast. Sometimes, the marble moves around and ejects a knife further into my ribs, which causes the pain to radiate throughout my entire right torso.
It’s the kind of pain that really feels like it should be caused by something specific, something provable. Something that can be fixed, or at least treated. Something like cancer.
I know how messed up it is to hope for cancer. And I know that if I ever actually do get cancer, I will fully regret these thoughts.
To be honest, I thought my days of hoping the cancer test comes back positive were long gone. After I got the EDS diagnosis, I hoped I could finally just accept my chronic pain fate.
But when I opened my mammogram results on MyChart yesterday, a tinge of disappointment washed over me as I saw that everything was “normal.”
I realized just how much I still longed for a more tangible diagnosis, and how much I still desperately wished my pain came with some sort of cure.
There is one major upside to all this though: At least I don’t have cancer.
