12-year-old girl
Hello, my name is Lea and I’m 12 years old.
My headaches started in February 2010. From then on they were always there and never gone. I woke up with a headache and went to sleep at night with one.
In the beginning the headaches weren’t so bad and I thought they would go away with time, but they stayed. In spite of this I tried to stick to my normal daily life. I think only my many hobbies helped me tolerate the pain.
Nothing changed with my school marks, so many people didn’t believe how bad my pain was. Neither the teachers nor my friends.
The worse the pain became the more I consulted doctors and therapists of various specialties. I believe that my parents and the doctors wanted to help me, but they didn’t know how. At some point we just didn’t know anymore. We had tried everything possible and I simply tried as much as possible not to pay attention to the pain. But with time it became increasingly intolerable. I felt awful when I came home from school and didn’t feel like doing anything.
At some point we heard a report on the radio about the Children’s Pain Center in Datteln. Of course it was immediately obvious that we should at least try it. I was so glad to be admitted there in the fall of last year and hoped that the intolerable headaches would now finally get better.
The time in Datteln was really nice, and I don’t regret going there. The people were all totally nice, the nurses and therapists as well as the other patients. We had a lot of fun together. Even just with the many distractions there my headaches diminished. You were busy the whole time and had no time at all to think about headaches.
With the distraction techniques and relaxation therapies I learned there I got my headaches under control, and I now feel much better. For sure, the pain is still always there, but it’s definitely weaker.
Now and then I’ll have a relapse, mostly on days when I’m really bored. Then the headaches are as bad as before the therapy, and I’m afraid I’ll go to bed and wake up again in the morning with bad pain, just as before, but luckily that doesn’t happen.
I am very glad to have done the pain therapy, and I don’t know who I would now be if I hadn’t done it. Learning that there are other kids who feel just as I do also helped me a lot. They had the same problem and knew how it was to have to live with constant pain.
A big THANK YOU to everyone who helped me to feel much better again! I think I have become more cheerful and less reserved.
So, in short: The pain therapy helped me a lot, and I can only recommend that kids who have a similar problem do the same.
Lea