About Anna

 AHi, this is me!

Here I am hanging out of a train carriage in northern India in 2007. I've never been fond of being indoors too much, so when chronic pain due to RA and two traffic accidents stole my life away, I had no other options than to fight back.


My pain story began when I was 17 years old and was participating in an expedition sailing a viking ship across the Black Sea to Istanbul. It was physically very strenuous, and it didn't help that I - to show off how strong I was - arm wrestled with greek fishermen in the port when we weren't sailing (ahhh, the stupidity of youth...) I got an inflammation in my right arm, and it stayed with me as a severe tendinitis that spread to my left arm and both shoulders. A year later the joints in my hands and knees became inflamed and after a few months I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis.

The local rheumatology hospital planned a great future for me, involving plastic joint replacements, titanium wheelchairs, and life long treatment with cell poisoning and cortisone, whereupon I decided to try living in a warmer climate and see how I could improve my own health instead.

I moved to Indonesia - where a good friend of mine was living and studying - and got a job as an English teacher, the arthritis was much better. 10 months later I was in a bus accident there (the bus had no brakes and I was in the front seat) and my spine was fractured - a complex compression fracture in Sacrum, L4, L5, L1&L2. The lowest vertebrae L5 was completely crushed and there were slivers of bone in the spinal canal and nerve. At the hospital in Indonesia I lay on a plank for 10 days without pain medication, and was transported back to Norway where I went through two failed spinal surgeries.

My life as a chronic pain patient began.

3 years later I was out walking (I could still walk!!!) my dog around the block when I was hit by a drunk driver in a zebra crossing, flew 10 meters through the air and sustained a whiplash. For this I did not get any compensation because the insurance company's doctors managed to prove "I was already injured". From then on my life was pure hell for another 3 years, before I met a neurosurgeon in Sweden who used some new techniques (new then, in 2002 not now) and I went through a spinal fusion from Sacrum to L4 with bone transplant.

After that my acute pain got a lot better, but I was stuck with the chronic pain, mostly muscular and with inflammation in joints, tendons and muscles from the RA. 

It got worse before it got better, and I got very very weak, burned out physically and was stuck in a wheelchair or hospital bed most of the time for the next few years. At that point I was 29 years old, the doctors had given up on me and would only feed me pills but not help me try to get better. So I understood that if I ever wanted to be anything other than a patient, I had to do it myself. 




I learned everything I could about coping techniques and self help for chronic pain - gradually including all these techniques in my daily life, and reclaiming it in the process. 
By doing all these little life style changes, also changing my diet and working to rebuild my body gradually, I worked my way out of the wheelchair in 2005. That autumn I walked, limped and rolled my way across the Spanish mainland, to complete an 800 km pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella! When I stood on the cliffs watching the sun set in the Atlantic after walking 800 kilometers, I knew things would never be the same again. And they never have been.

Today I have a great, challenging and meaningful life despite chronic pain. I have been training martial arts and yoga for 7 years. I have done a lot of volunteer work and gotten a degree in linguistics and project management. In 2010  my memoir "Kronisk" was published in Norwegian, and I now run a political blog about the Norwegian health care system called diagnostisert.no with support from the Free Speech foundation Fritt Ord. I currently live in Sweden with my wonderful, supportive boyfriend Samuel who loves to make me laugh, we are getting married this summer :)

I still have pain almost every day, but mostly not above 7 on the pain scale. Sometimes I have good periods, and there are days when I realize I can't remember when I last had pain... those days are really amazing... 


In this blog I share everything I've learned about living with chronic pain, how to overcome it and to enjoy life with chronic illness.