SEARCHING FOR A CURE
Keira told how her back injury coupled with studying for a post-graduate diploma in Cancer and Clinical Oncology, and a bereavement, left her ‘really stressed’.
‘I started suffering from terrible headaches,’ she recalled. ‘They were so severe that I got them for five to six days at a time and for 24/7.
‘I was constantly in pain – it stopped me going to work some days and left my mood low and my social life in tatters.’
Presuming she was suffering from stress-induced headaches, Keira said she visited her GP several times but was simply prescribed painkillers.
‘The pain was so intense and for such long periods of time that I began to think that if that was going to be my quality of life it wasn’t worth it,’ she admitted. ‘I felt like I couldn’t live like that any more.’
After a year of suffering, Keira went to see a neurologist at Mount Alvernia Hospital in Guildford.
He suggested her headaches were a result of ‘medication overuse’ and advised her to stop taking her prescribed drugs and visit an acupuncturist.
Keira admitted the alternative therapy ‘helped a bit’ but the pain remained constant, day in, day out.
It when then that her husband Jim remarked on how much she was grinding her teeth in the night, complaining it was keeping him awake.
