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