Chronic pain rehabilitation program gives patients a new outlook on life
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Kristen Oliphant has five diagnoses that cause her chronic pain; some of them have no known cure, so she had to learn to live with pain as a part of her life until she got help through the IU Health Pain Rehabilitation Program.
She was told she has fibromyalgia, avascular necrosis of bilateral hips, epigastric pain, migraines, and endometriosis all before turning 40. These all caused her debilitating pain.
“You’re constantly in pain. If you’re in a lot of pain it takes your focus, it takes your mental focus, it makes it harder to work on the tasks,” said Oliphant.
She works as a software engineer, a job that requires constant focus.
“I’m lucky to still have a full-time job. That’s when it got really scary, that I would feel so bad that I would have to miss days of work,” said Oliphant. “Having to be at the mercy of this chronic pain and missing days and letting the team down were pretty difficult in my mind.”
Physical therapy helped Oliphant regain strength while mental health counseling helped her through this isolating experience.
“We want to focus on people’s behaviors and we want to make them feel they can take a more active approach to manage their pain instead of feeling like it’s passive or out of their control,” explained Dr. Lindsay Flegge, a clinical health psychologist. “We know that your mood can address your pain so how do we address that? We know that there are different complications about work and sleep and dealing with pain.”
This all-encompassing program brings in multiple disciplines including a nurse practitioner and pharmacist to help manage medications once a week. Patients also get to do yoga and massage therapy as well as work on life skills in occupational therapy.
“That magic sauce that we call it is bringing everyone together as a team and approaching it as really individualized and realizing we need to take a mind, body, spirit approach we can’t just look at one part in isolation, there’s not a magic pill,” Flegge said.
Since finishing the three week program in the summer, Oliphant has accomplished her first goal of cooking dinner for herself and her husband three days a week and has other fun plans on the horizon.
Oliphant and her husband are looking to start traveling more now that she has a better handle on her chronic pain.