Jeff McGinn

1 The last few years has been no easy road, but with much will power, strength, and support from others I have managed to get my life back on track. In October of 2006, I had a sudden onset of substantial pain and numbness on the inside of my right calf. At the time, I was playing football for my high school and club soccer. As the pain, swelling, and numbness began to increase, I saw a doctor to see what the problem was (thinking I had injured myself training). The doctor looked at my leg and asked a variety of questions before he recommended x-rays. As the x-rays came back negative, he recommended that I have a bone scan. The bone scan was booked but I was told it would take a while to get into have it done. I decided to fight through the pain and keep practicing and playing football. With every practice and every game, the pain got worse. As our team continued our undefeated season, I needed more will power to keep playing. It got to the point where I would limp around class all day and then ice before practice, tape-up and play, then ice again after. On November 10 2006, our team played in the City Finals, as soon as that game was over; I picked up a pair of crutches and took the recommended time off that was suggested. Finally, the day came where I got the results for my bone scan, to which was negative like the X-rays. My doctor recommended that I take time off football but I decided that without a diagnosis I was not going to stop competing. Knowing this, my doctor referred me to an orthopedic surgeon at the Alberta Children’s Hospital. The orthopedic surgeon thought that my muscles were causing the problems and ordered many various tests over the next three months. X-rays were constantly being done every week, MRI’s were done every month, ultra-sounds were done frequently, ecg and ece exams were performed monthly. With every test coming back negative I was further referred to a chronic pain clinic at the hospital. The pain specialist figured my problem was being caused by nerves and switched me off and on different medication (portable iv/pills/creams) for another three months. While still on crutches, the pain medication was not helping at all, and my pain, swelling, and numbness were still getting worse. My doctors considered me and anomaly and asked for outside help across North America and Europe to help solve my problem. I was seen by a sports medicine doctor who thought I may have a very unique case of Chronic Compartment Syndrome, a case that causes the outer layer of the muscle to contract and suffocate the muscles. Normally this is caused by a crushing injury and to have it spontaneously occur had never happened. The diagnosis for this is to take a pressure needle (similar to a spinal tap), and insert it into the muscle to test if the pressure inside the muscle is elevated. The doctor determined late on a Friday that my pressure was elevated and scheduled me for surgery first thing Monday morning. After seven months of tests, the problem had finally been discovered. The correction for this is to make an incision down the outer layer of the muscle and release the inner part so it can expand and contract as required. 2 Three weeks after my surgery, my leg was healing very well but I began having pain on the outside of my leg. With the first surgery, only one of the compartments had caused trouble and the other four were left alone. I called my sport medicine doctor and immediately he performed the pressure test. He immediately made a call to my surgeon at the Children’s hospital but to everyone’s surprise, I had turned 18 in the last few weeks and would not be allowed to have surgery in that hospital. After a few phone calls, I was at the Peter Laugheed Hospital having emergency surgery on the other four compartments in my right leg. Again, to everyone’s surprise, two weeks passed and I suddenly had the same pain but this time in my left leg. Once again I called my sport medicine doctor and once the pressure test was performed, he called my surgeon again and I was on my way to have surgery on all five compartments on my left leg. With this surgery, my right leg seemed to be completely healed but my left leg had extreme complications from the surgery. I had developed a hematoma (blood pool caused from internal bleeding) in my calf. After a few days of trying to decrease the swelling, another surgery was done to insert a drain so that the blood could drain outside my leg and the swelling could go down. Once the surgery for the drain had been done, I spent a week in hospital to make sure I was on track. Once being discharged from hospital, I had to see a nurse everyday for six weeks in order to have my drain checked and slowly removed a little bit each day. Once the six weeks was up however, I found I was still having pain in my left calf. The doctor recommended waiting a little bit to let my leg adapt to the swelling and the surgeries and see what happens. About four weeks passed and I returned to see my doctor because the symptoms had still not subsided. The doctor performed another pressure test and determined that the bleeding had created excess scar tissue that in turn created the compartment syndrome yet again. Finally the compartment syndrome seemed to be completely fixed and my calves weren’t in extreme pain. As I slowly returned to training and living a semi-regular life, the pain began to come back in my left calf. To make matters worse, I ended up tearing my ACL, MCL and Meniscus in a soccer game in December of 2008. When I returned to my sport medicine doctor, he once again booked me for surgery but just for my knee. When I asked him about my calf, he told me that the medical community could not do any more and didn’t know why it was getting worse. Subsequently, I was on my own for trying to make the pain in my leg stop. I began trying everything that anyone could possibly recommend. I tried acupuncture, acupressure, physiotherapy, laser treatment, massage therapy and everything else I heard of with no success at all. With my frustration and stress climbing as each possibility failed, I was recommended hypnotical regression therapy. I really didn’t believe that this was the answer that I was looking for and was probably the strongest person against this idea around. But someone asked me how badly did I want the pain to go away and how badly didn’t I want to be better or back to myself living my life. That’s when it truly hit me, I needed to do 3 this with an open mind, believing that it could make everything better and put my life back on track. On certain days when I wake up, I still have trouble believing that after only a few sessions of hypnotical regression therapy, my pain had diminished so much that I did not notice it until finally it was gone. The pain that I was feeling was attached to emotions in my past and once the physical problem had been fixed, I needed to deal with the emotional aspect in order to get better. The other thing that the hypnosis did was work on increasing my recovery from the knee surgery I was waiting on. Today, about 7 months after my knee surgery, I have had no pain in my calves at all, and I am recovering extremely quickly from my knee surgery that my doctors are even surprised with my progress. I have completely returned to training, running, cycling, and lifting weights. I am hoping to be back playing soccer very shortly. Needless to say, that hypnosis helped me more than I can explain and even more than I may choose to believe. If there was ever another time when I had any issue that I thought hypnosis would help with I would not hesitate at all to return because after dealing with the emotional issues, my life has returned to exactly where I want it to be.

Jeff McGinn