Costochondritis kicks you when you are down

On Monday morning, on the way to work, I sneezed.

Bang. The months of pain that I thought I had put behind me (at least for a little while) came flooding back.

I made it into work, spent the rest of the day sat on the same chair, unwilling to move and eventually crawled home.

I spent all of Tuesday flat on my back hoping it would go away, with hot water bottles and anti inflammatories and my good old friend coco-damol.

I'm hoping it's just a blip and it will go away as quickly as it came back but right now, I feel like I am back to square 0. and it hurts.

Any ideas on how to stop a costochondritis flare up in its tracks?

so here's what I did next........

I decided, after being dumped by the Physio. To do things my own way. So.. I signed up at the local gym. I decided to take one gentle exercise class a week and work with the gym staff to work out a programme that me (and my ribs) could cope with. So I started slow and increased week by week. One thing I have learned in 15 years of costochondritis is not to take things too quickly.

And then.... miraculously things started to get better. I have to admit that at the same time, I tried to be more conscious of my diet (less wheat, sugar and dairy) and be more conscious of my posture. I heated the area every day with a hot water bottle and tried to get enough rest.

And all of that seemed to work and the pain I felt seemed to be at a manageable level. I stopped taking the cocodamol, and was back down to plain old paracetamol. Things were going well until......

Even my physiotherapist has dumped me...!

I started seeing a Physiotherapist at the start of the year to see if it would help my chronic costochondrities. I have seen a few before but this one came highly recommended by many so I thought that another try would not hurt.

But she has now officially dumped me!

Her verdict is that I am too broken to fix - at least for now.

She tried just doing some very very light work on me and it caused a massive flare-up that has not gone away since (about a month). She thinks that any manipulation she does will just have the same result.

So.... What next????

First post

This is my first post.

I have been meaning to start this blog for a long time. But have decided, probably somewhat foolishly to make 2012 the year where I really try, harder than I have ever tried before, to beat my chronic costochondritis by the end of the year and thought a blog might be a good way of getting some inspiration and hopefully a little help from others.

It will likely fall by the wayside, as with many of my other goals for the year.

Hopefully I will post about other things. Things I find interesting as well as my attempts to get better.