David Contorno: “I have been fighting for my life”

Over the years, I’ve published a lot of content in industry publications, including BenefitsPRO, as well as on social media. Many of my posts and articles have made a lot of other people uncomfortable; however this one will challenge my own comfort levels. 

It’s been a very tough year for me.  I have faced physical and mental health struggles that have tested me in ways I didn’t know I was capable of withstanding.  Exposing failures in the insurance and health care industry is easy for me, but doing the same about myself is not.

My goal in writing and sharing this with you is threefold:

1. To help someone out there who is almost certainly facing similar trials.
2. To raise awareness about how health care really can go awry, even for someone like me with a wealth of knowledge and a 30-year health care consulting career.
3. And to be able to thank the countless number of comrades who have reached out, checked in on me, and helped me get back to a point of stability.

I am not just some online figure who is magically immune to the very things I expose and uncover about this business of health care.  You may see a professional persona when I take a stage, or post a prickly opinion on a social platform, but so much more of the time, I am a husband, a father, a stepfather, and a human being.  And I have been fighting for my life.

In January this year, I felt a sharp, shooting pain along the outside of my right thigh.  It quickly spread down my leg and, as the days dragged on, it became more intense with fewer and fewer moments of relief. There was no obvious explanation for why this was happening; I had not been injured or developed any autoimmune conditions that would cause this pain.  

Because I am an experienced health care consultant, I knew that the first course of action was to take a non-invasive clinical approach.  I began managing the pain with over-the-counter medications like Advil and Tylenol, and then graduated to prescriptions like Celebrex.  Although I kept taking the NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories), they didn’t seem to do much to manage the pain – on a good day it barely took the edge off.  As the days wore on, I became more worn out, both physically and mentally. 

Walking became an excruciating chore, and sleep became a thing of the past.  Eventually, there was no position, awake or otherwise, that would provide any relief from this feeling of a lightning rod impaling me from hip to ankle.  When the pain did not resolve itself, I knew I had to get an official diagnosis in order to continue searching for possible solutions. Eventually, it was discovered that I had a pinched sciatic nerve.

The next six months featured a series of intense physical therapy in providers offices and at home; countless chiropractic adjustments to try to untangle the nerve; massage therapy to ease the tension my body was creating around the pain, cryotherapy because… why not?  I hobbled around everywhere with heat pads, ice packs, and TENS machines. And every now and then, I was professionally stretched like a pretzel by a man who was much larger than me.   Before every appointment, I would limp in with hope that this time… maybe, just maybe, it would work out.  But it never did.  The crushing disappointment every time a treatment didn’t work took me further into the darker corners of my psyche. 

My pain was not just affecting me, but everyone around me.  I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t travel, I couldn’t help around the house.   I was incapable of being a good partner to my wife, a good father to my kids, or a good leader to my team and colleagues.   I stopped showing up for meetings, at first because I couldn’t get through a meeting without wincing and groaning, but later because I found myself lacking any value to offer.  I knew people must have been getting tired of asking how I was and hearing the same answer – not good.  At some point I just stopped engaging with anyone at all.  I felt like a burden to everyone around me. 

At home, I kept my wife up for nights-on-end just trying to find enough relief to sleep for a few moments at a time.  My kids started getting used to seeing me sitting or laying somewhere around the house in the middle of the day after giving in to the pain.  They all stopped asking for my contributions around the house — and in their lives.  I could no longer cook dinner, which I’ve always loved to do.  I couldn’t attend my kids’ activities because I couldn’t sit long enough, or I was so thoroughly exhausted from lack of sleep that I couldn’t safely drive.  That meant I couldn’t help my wife with the school commute or grocery shopping, and we couldn’t even go out on our regular date nights.  I watched her take on more and more of our household and our lives as I sank further into my depression.  The clouds got darker around me, and I spent most days questioning if I should even be here at all.  It seemed to me that my presence just made everything harder for everyone around me. 

In June, I was fortunate enough to travel to Costa Rica with a good friend of mine who works as a clinician; the goal being to focus on breaking through the mental and emotional anguish of the previous months.  While the trip gave me some sense of enlightenment and helped clear my mind, I returned home with a nasty stomach bug that lingered for a couple of weeks, and still no physical relief from my pain.  I was still taking NSAIDs every day.

June is also the month of my anniversary and after an exceptionally tough six months, I wanted more than anything to make the day special for my wife, Emma.  But there was an ultimatum on the table from her: Start looking into surgical options, or else. 

The day before our anniversary, she drove me to an MRI clinic with strict orders (both hers and the doctors).  Sure enough, I had a bulging herniated disc at the L4-L5 which was pressing directly on my sciatic nerve.  But despite my wife urging me to see a surgeon, I was just too afraid.  The thought of having this pain forever frightened me, but worse would be getting a back surgery that lead to a lifetime of irreversible pain or repeat surgeries like my mother has suffered through since I was a child.  The idea of going under the knife filled me with fear.  

At the very end of June, my wife left for a brief business trip and returned to find me in dire straits.  After contracting the stomach bug, I had been increasingly dizzy, short of breath, and my vision was sporadically failing.  My wife had finally had enough and demanded that we get in the car, go to urgent care, and get a steroid shot… or something.  We both thought the pain had finally reached its peak.

At the urgent care intake, the clinical team started noting my vitals.  They took my blood pressure — and then they took it again.  Nurses exchanged glances and went to fetch a doctor who brought a manual pressure cuff.  I looked at my wife, who I knew had seen the result of both readings. Her face was shocked as she scanned between the nurses and me. 

“Your blood pressure is 71/44; We need to transport you to the emergency room, immediately”, the doctor said.  I knew the look on my wife’s face was one not to argue with.

At the ER, I was rapidly taken back to a room where nurses and doctors rushed to place an IV, complete blood work, and talk through the history with my wife.  In under an hour, I was diagnosed with acute renal (kidney) failure.  My left kidney was not functioning at all, and my right kidney was filtering at about 10%.  Between the NSAIDs, the stomach bug, and my increased lack of mobility, I was so severely dehydrated that my organs had started to shut down.  When the kidneys stop working, they are unable to remove waste from the blood or control essential fluid levels, so my body had started to build up waste, known as uremia, and my vital functions started to falter.

I was assigned to the dialysis ward for four days on constant fluids, antibiotics, steroids, and pain medications before my blood pressure stabilized.  Through some miracle, I managed to avoid dialysis, and the incredible team of specialists were confident they could reverse the damage.  The greatest symptom I continued to feel, however, was the continued sciatic pain.  I was discharged from the hospital with a prescription for oxycodone and a couple of refills. 

As these months wore on, I felt less and less connected to all of you, to our industry, and to my profession.  I couldn’t attend the conferences that I had committed to; sometimes due to the physical pain, but more often due to the failings of my own mental health.  I started to lose my way, along with my identity.  If I couldn’t be a husband, a father, or even a good consultant, what did I have left?

After even more pushing from my wife, I finally decided to consider surgical options.  With immense gratitude for my network, which includes some of the most renowned and respected surgeons in the U.S., I was able to connect with a high-quality, orthopedic surgeon in Charlotte who practices minimally invasive surgery.  Together, we determined I was a candidate for a microdiscectomy and, because I am a cash pay patient, I saw my surgeon within two days and was under the knife one week later in mid-August.

I woke up in the recovery room wondering if I was still under anesthesia.  My sciatic pain was completely gone for the first time all year.  I was cautiously elated.  My wife drove me home that very day with a quick stop at the drive-thru pharmacy for a refill of oxycodone. 

About three days after my surgery, the only discomfort I was experiencing was a dull pain from the incision in my lower back, so I began discarding the medications I had collected.  For the first time in a very long time, I started to feel normal.  

But I then developed the worst headache of my life, followed by body sweats, nausea and vomiting.  I couldn’t eat, I was incredibly light sensitive, and my head pounded every moment of the day.  I had no idea at the time that I was withdrawing from opioids.  I had no experience with any type of withdrawal in my life and I’m here to tell you, it is exceptionally unpleasant. The last thing you want after back surgery is to be violently convulsing and vomiting over a toilet bowl.

It took over a week for my body to flush out just three or four weeks of opioids.  That’s all it takes to become dependent on a prescription without ever knowing it’s happening.   And where did it start?  With a legitimate order for a valid medical concern in which pain needed to be managed.

Today, I am still dealing with lingering mental health issues.  I still have a lot more recovering to do. Physically, I’ll need a lot of rehabilitation to ensure my nerve is not permanently damaged from months of compression, but more than that, I have a lot of work to do to restore my mental health.  

Chronic pain took so much from me this year.  It pushed me to limits I never expected to face; I guess none of us do.  It tested my family and many of my relationships, both personally and professionally.  It made me question my sanity, my strength, and my worth.  It removed me from my business, my clients, my industry, my marriage and the things that give me purpose in my life. 

And so, I share this with you today with a small sense of hope, because over the months, so many of you have shared yourselves with me. The text messages, phone calls, and personal visits have propped me up.  People have taken a moment to check in on me, on my wife, and offer their support in the kindest of ways.  Folks have opened up to me about their own mental health struggles and made me feel so much less alone.  As I reexamine who I am after having lost so much of my sense of self this year,  I want to be more like so many of you: caring, vulnerable, authentic, honest… a good friend. 

I know it will take time to recover from the misery of this year, but I am ready and willing to do the work.  I have never felt more motivated to help others navigate the health care system and improve their quality of life.   This new chapter for me means I need to reintroduce myself to you as someone who is more humble, more empathic, and more selfless.  These are traits I have admired in so many others over the years but at times, struggled to manifest in myself. 

So, I hope you’ll welcome me back to the community I have missed so much.  And I thank you all so sincerely for holding this space for me.  

I said there would be takeaways, so here goes:

1. It’s OK to not be OK.
2. Just because something is over the counter, doesn’t mean it’s safe for prolonged use.
3. Opioids are highly addictive, even when taken as directed and even over short periods of time.  Please be cautious. 
4. Sometimes surgery is the answer and it’s OK to be afraid.
5. Leading with fear can drastically delay finding peace.
6. And, of course, and maybe most importantly… listen to your damn wife!

Part 2 coming soon……here come the bills.