Speaker 1: Hi, listeners, friends, fans of this podcast. How are you? Yes,
Speaker 1: you are listening to Healthy Ish, the daily podcast from
Speaker 1: Body and Soul. I am your host of Felicity Harley.
Speaker 1: Yoga teacher and author Kirsten Moore joins me today now.
Speaker 1: She was diagnosed with a spinal tumor at twenty one,
Speaker 1: and she shares her experience with managing chronic pain and
Speaker 1: eventually her addiction to opioids. A word of warning, we
Speaker 1: deal with some heavy topics in this chat. If you
Speaker 1: want to hear Kirsten's full story, it's pretty gritty, it's epic.
Speaker 1: She has healed, she's managing well. Today you can listen
Speaker 1: into Extra Healthy ISSU, where we talk all about the above.
Speaker 1: You can grab that wherever you get your podcasts. Kirstin,
Speaker 1: thanks for joining us on the podcast today. How are you?
Speaker 1: I'm doing good? Thank you? You've had good having me good?
Speaker 1: You just come off teaching a yoga class. Yes, very zen,
Speaker 1: good to hear well. I want to talk to you
Speaker 1: today about addiction to prescription medication. It's not something we've
Speaker 1: actually talked about on the podcast, but I think it's
Speaker 1: very real. Around three point four million Aussies of have
Speaker 1: chronic long term pain and more than half of women,
Speaker 1: which I think is really important to point out, not
Speaker 1: saying they're all addicted, but addiction to opioids is rising.
Speaker 1: Tell us about your experience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when you say that, you know, I'm not surprised, unfortunately.
Speaker 2: I think so many people struggle with chronic pain anyway,
Speaker 2: and women. I think I think the stats are that
Speaker 2: women experience chronic pain more than men, and like when
Speaker 2: they go to doctors, I think it's kind of used
Speaker 2: as like an easy fix in some ways. You know,
Speaker 2: not not on purpose, but doctors only have less than
Speaker 2: fifteen minutes with a patient most of the time, and
Speaker 2: so you sort of rushed through. And if a patient
Speaker 2: is sitting in front of you in pain, asking for
Speaker 2: help and you've only got fifteen minutes, I mean, it's
Speaker 2: kind of.
Speaker 1: The easy solution.
Speaker 2: It's the easy solution. It's a band aid solution, unfortunately,
Speaker 2: but it is. It is an easier solution for them
Speaker 2: to do something on the spot, and I guess it
Speaker 2: just spirals from there, at least it did in my case.
Speaker 1: What's it a pain? Were you experiencing?
Speaker 2: So I had a spinal tumor. I was diagnosed with
Speaker 2: the tumor in my spine at twenty one, and because
Speaker 2: I was doing some yoga and exercise classes at the time,
Speaker 2: I just thought i'd pulled a muscle. So for a
Speaker 2: long time it just felt like that deep strain, like
Speaker 2: you've strained a muscle, and then it didn't go away.
Speaker 2: So it stayed for like five months, six months. We
Speaker 2: were doing tests and stuff and nothing was really showing
Speaker 2: up until finally they found the tumor. So it was
Speaker 2: just this aching pain. I remember being covered in ice packs.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I was living at home at the time, and Mum
Speaker 2: was just constantly bringing me more ice packs to stack
Speaker 2: on top of myself in order to be able to
Speaker 2: go to sleep and feel somewhat comfortable. But yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean even at that time, I was having preting prescribed
Speaker 2: opiates for this extreme pain.
Speaker 1: And what happened with your tumor tell us a bit
Speaker 1: more about that.
Speaker 2: So I ended up being on kind of an experimental
Speaker 2: chemotherapy for about eighteen months before I was able to
Speaker 2: have a surgery, and that's sort of when things escalated.
Speaker 2: I suppose with the addiction, my pain became very extreme. Obviously,
Speaker 2: when I was in hospital, I was on a lot
Speaker 2: of morphine drips and stuff because I'd had a full
Speaker 2: spine or resection that means rods in the spine, you know,
Speaker 2: removed a whole vertebra, and it was I won't go
Speaker 2: into too much detail here, but it was not pretty.
Speaker 1: You're only twenty one, I mean, wow, Yeah, it was tough.
Speaker 2: It was tough, and I like at the time, you know,
Speaker 2: you feel like an adult when you're twenty one. But
Speaker 2: now in my thirties, my mid thirties, I look back
Speaker 2: and I think I was a baby, that poor girl.
Speaker 2: So yeah, it was a lot of pain meds at
Speaker 2: the time being pumped into me necessarily at that time. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but my problem was that my pain sort of became
Speaker 2: chronic and after the surgery, and that just meant that
Speaker 2: I continued on those medications for years.
Speaker 1: What was your pain? Can you describe it more about
Speaker 1: your pain afterwards and perhaps how it just never went away?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess in some ways it changed. So there
Speaker 2: was severe pain for about six months after the surgery.
Speaker 2: I want to give some people hope if they're having
Speaker 2: spinal surgery. You know, the real severe pain when I
Speaker 2: was bedridden was about three months and then I was
Speaker 2: able to start reducing medication and start moving a lot
Speaker 2: more around that time, and then building up six months
Speaker 2: was pretty good. I was able to study a little
Speaker 2: bit and you know, do it a tiny bit of
Speaker 2: work again. But the pain as I healed became much
Speaker 2: more about tension and I think scar tissue. Even though
Speaker 2: I was moving, I was a yoga instructor, so I'm
Speaker 2: still moving quite a bit. And what it's been like
Speaker 2: in the last few years has just been as if
Speaker 2: my muscles are post exercise, just squeezed tightly constantly, particularly
Speaker 2: in my neck and shoulders. You know. Nowadays, I will
Speaker 2: do a pilates class and I'm pretty I'm pretty good
Speaker 2: at listening to my body. I'll be pretty gentle with myself.
Speaker 2: But if I overdo it even a little bit, I
Speaker 2: wake up the next day and I will feel it.
Speaker 2: My neck will be really sore, I'll have really bad headaches,
Speaker 2: and it's just, you know, it's just a real game
Speaker 2: of balance, really, which is not a word that addicts
Speaker 2: tend to like.
Speaker 1: No, no, not at all. When did you actually realize
Speaker 1: you were addicted to opioids after your operation?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think I when I started to heal,
Speaker 2: I started to become more aware. You know, when I
Speaker 2: was first taking them, they were just treating the pain,
Speaker 2: so I didn't really notice much of the after effects,
Speaker 2: the other effects that might have been a little bit
Speaker 2: more euphoric. But as I started to heal and my
Speaker 2: pain was more manageable, then I was able to start
Speaker 2: noticing these more interesting effects that I was enjoying, and
Speaker 2: my life kind of blew up. I was experiencing a
Speaker 2: lot of grief at the same time, So then I
Speaker 2: was realizing that as well as treating physical pain, they
Speaker 2: were able to treat emotional and mental pain just as
Speaker 2: well in some cases.
Speaker 1: So how did you? I suppose the simple words I
Speaker 1: get off them, like how did you heal? And wean you? Like,
Speaker 1: what is the word like? Get up?
Speaker 2: Yeah, wean yourself off?
Speaker 1: I suppose.
Speaker 2: Look, I was told that, and I even at twenty one,
Speaker 2: I knew that I had kind of addictive personality. I
Speaker 2: hadn't really, you know, experienced anything in that world before.
Speaker 2: I'd never taken drugs before, but just in terms of
Speaker 2: I had had an RX as a teenager. That's a
Speaker 2: very obsessive condition. I would look at magazines and look
Speaker 2: at all these women with their like distorted faces from
Speaker 2: plastic surgery and be like, I should never have plastic surgery.
Speaker 1: That will be me.
Speaker 2: I just kind of had this sense about myself that
Speaker 2: I could easily become addicted to something. So I said
Speaker 2: to my doctor at the time, how before my surgery,
Speaker 2: how do people usually come off this strong medication, because
Speaker 2: I know it's addictive, and he was like, oh, most people,
Speaker 2: just as their pain resolves slowly wean themselves off it naturally.
Speaker 2: And in my head, I'm like, that's not going to
Speaker 2: be me. I just knew it, but I didn't say
Speaker 2: anything because my dad was in the room, and you know,
Speaker 2: it was embarrassed. So that's kind of what ended up happening,
Speaker 2: you know, didn't It didn't naturally wean off for me.
Speaker 2: And maybe it is because I ended up having so
Speaker 2: many tragic life events happen simultaneously. But I use the
Speaker 2: drugs like a crutch, so to come off them I
Speaker 2: required a lot of help.
Speaker 1: What advice do you have for anyone who is perhaps
Speaker 1: feeling they might be in a similar situation, or there's
Speaker 1: someone around them who they've got a sense that, oh,
Speaker 1: I just worry this could go the wrong way.
Speaker 2: It's so hard because I think my family knew that
Speaker 2: something was wrong for a long time, and a lot
Speaker 2: of people around me could see that I wasn't well,
Speaker 2: but because I was experiencing so much grief and mental
Speaker 2: health issues at the time, and heartache from losing some
Speaker 2: people very close to me, they could sort of chop
Speaker 2: it all up to grief, you know, like grief looks
Speaker 2: different for everyone, and a lot of my behaviors was
Speaker 2: associated with that, but a lot of it was also
Speaker 2: very erratic because of the drugs, and if somebody had
Speaker 2: come up to me and said, hey, I think you
Speaker 2: have an issue, why don't you stop taking those pills,
Speaker 2: it would not have gone well, no, so it really
Speaker 2: had to come from me. Unfortunately for me, it was
Speaker 2: when I started to see not just I was hurting myself,
Speaker 2: but my mum and my brother and those closest to
Speaker 2: me really starting to suffer. Not everyone feels that way
Speaker 2: or gets to that point, but for me, I did.
Speaker 2: And it was the same when I had my anorexia
Speaker 2: and I just thought, no, this is causing too many
Speaker 2: ripples of destruction. I need to get help. And in
Speaker 2: my case, I knew that I couldn't do it on
Speaker 2: my own, so I did end up going to rehab
Speaker 2: and having a lot of people on my medical team
Speaker 2: sort of helping me.
Speaker 1: Out asking for help. That's really the key, there, isn't it. Kirstin,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for coming on Healthy Ish.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: Hey, if you want to hear more from Kirstin, you
Speaker 1: can read her in your book. It is called Gutta
Speaker 1: Glitter and it out now. And by the way, if
Speaker 1: someone or someone around you need some help when it
Speaker 1: comes to addiction, please see Lifeline. We will leave a
Speaker 1: link to that in the show notes. Of course, you
Speaker 1: can google Lifeline or call their twenty four to seven
Speaker 1: support line on one three one one one four. If
Speaker 1: you enjoyed this chat, jump on tell us. Yes, you
Speaker 1: can rate and review this episode and subscribe to this podcast.
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Speaker 1: stay healthy Ish