Erin_Roy
Team
29 Oct 2026, 08:05 UTC
I've had CRPS since I was 6 years old. I broke my left foot after a bookshelf had fallen on it. The pain was never actually where the small fracture was. It took 3 years for a doctor to take me seriously and to finally diagnosed me. I went for ketamine treatment in Cape Town and left there walking, but there was still a lingering pain. Later that same year I found a neurologist who somehow put me into remission. I don't know what he did. I think his method was more of a scare tactic on my brain, I would love to meet up with him now to find out exactly what he did, since he changed my life.
I was in remission for over 4 years until COVID-19 and the stress of the whole situation showed up in the form of pain in my foot. I got it under control with antidepressants and anti anxiety medication.
In 2022, I developed terrible headaches that caused me to take over 8 stilpane a day. This lead me to create an allergy towards codeine. The doctor that I was with, found out that my occipital nerves were compressed by fibrosis. He decided to cut them. It worked, I didn't have headaches for over a year. Then, I formed a neuroma. He took it out and that recovery period was extremely traumatic and I then unfortunately developed CRPS in the back of my head. I was doing ketamine treatment throughout, even had a medical port placed to help, which my body eventually rejected. During this time I had also had a severe fall at school and slammed my hand hard into the ground - my CRPS decided to make another home base my hand. I moved to online school due to missing so much. Best decision my parents had ever made. I was on oxy and palexia throughout grade 11 & 12. I wrote my matric finals zonked. How I passed is a miracle. I had tried physio with a specialised physiotherapist for CRPS, ketamine and opioids - nothing worked. The only thing that worked about 50% was hypnotherapy. I decided to get a spinal cord stimulator. I had this implanted in October 2025. My body formed a seroma (fluid sac) around my battery that was implanted my chest, which eventually caused my neurosurgeon to move the battery to my abdomen. My body had still decided it wasn't done with complications and a CSF leak. The anchors on my paddle lead in my neck had corroded into my spinal cord. It's been 7 months since my last surgery and i'm doing better than i've ever been. Today as I am writing this, is my first day off opioids in 4 years. I don't need them anymore so I took the courageous step to slowly come off of them and I eventually met the end. I've been doing hypnotherapy to help with the pain that is still there that my SCS doesn't touch - this has opened a new window for me that I never thought was possible. I'm studying a higher certificate in communications and counselling and next year I want to specialise in hypnotherapy. My goal is to help people get away from traditional medicine and to focus on their subconscious and controlling the pain within. My want to share my knowledge with the subconscious mind and show the world that pain relief can happen without opioids.