Lara Pingue, pictured here with her husband and two children, was a runner and practiced yoga when she suffered a herniated disc in her lower back in 2018. The injury took months to be diagnosed, and her acute pain gradually transformed into chronic pain.
Pingue tried everything from physiotherapy to medication to steroid injections to surgery, but nothing eliminated the pain entirely. "When the pain was at its worst, it was like a screeching, loud alarm bell going off," she explains. "Now it's like a hum, but the sound is always there. That's how I describe living with chronic pain."
Everyone has felt acute pain, but for more than eight million Canadians, chronic unrelenting pain is part of everyday life.
"It's an invisible disability," says Dr. Andrea Furlan, a senior scientist at UHN's KITE Research Institute and a physiatrist with UHN's Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, about what's known as chronic pain. "I've had patients tell me they wish they had an amputation, cancer or a scar so people would take them seriously."
"The International Association for the Study of Pain agrees that anything beyond three months should be considered chronic pain," notes Dr. Anuj Bhatia, Director of the Comprehensive Integrated Pain Program at UHN and a clinician investigator with the Krembil Brain Institute.