A woman has been left in pain after developing a rare condition after an operation on her toe.
Marie Taylor-Alan lost her dream job, and has seen her marriage breakdown as she spends everyday in agony and left feeling as though she has been "set on fire and stabbed".
Marie suffers from Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS).
The poorly understood condition leaves the sufferer experiencing daily debilitating pain.
CRPS can affect people of any age, including children. But it tends to be more common in women who are 60 to 70 years of age.
Marie, 48, confessed that were it not for her son, she doesn’t know if she would have made it this fear.
“I am so fed up. I am fed up of being in pain all day. I am fed up of the lack of support.” She said.
She added: “To go from being happy, having fun, enjoying your life to being in constant complete agony, not understanding why you’re in agony.
“Being stuck in the house not able to go anywhere … if I didn’t have my son there, I don’t know if I would have made it. I felt so low.”
Marie's condition began after an operation when she was in her twenties.
She said: “I was in my early 20s, I had gone to have an operation to trim a bone in my toe and I was getting a lot of pain after which seemed a lot worse than what it should’ve been.
“At the time I was living in Sheffield and the operation was at the Northern General. I saw their pain consultants for quite a while and at one point I got told ‘come back in 100 years when we have a magic potion we can sprinkle on your feet’
“I wasn’t getting anywhere and I was getting desperate and my marriage broke down because of it.”
Marie had met her ex-husband around the time of the original operation and they would often go out.
Life continued as Marie spent her days in pain and the couple had a baby, but this made her condition worse and she spent half her pregnancy on bedrest.
Marie says her pain feels like she is “being doused in petrol and being set fire and stabbed repeatedly”.
Eventually her marriage broke down as she increasingly struggled to cope day-to-day with CRPS.
She said: “I didn’t know at the time that I had CRPS and that’s what it was.
“I can’t blame him for not understanding. I didn’t understand. I stopped feeling, I stopped caring and that’s not me.
“And I just didn’t care about anything anymore and I didn’t care about my husband and I was the one who said ‘I can’t do this anymore’.
“There was no single thing and I think that was harder on him. I just couldn’t feel anything anymore. I was just in so much pain I didn’t care about anything.”
She went from working nearly 70 hour weeks as a hotel manager to spending days in bed for CRPS.
Despite being a recognised condition, the NHS says CRPS is “poorly understood” and “its exact cause is still unclear”.
There are currently four main types of treatment for CRPS, according to the NHS.
- education and self-management – being given clear information about your condition and advice on any steps you can take to help manage it yourself
- physical rehabilitation – treatment to help manage your symptoms and reduce the risk of long-term physical problems, such as physiotherapy exercises
- pain relief – treatments to help reduce your pain, such as anticonvulsants or antidepressants
- psychological support – treatments to help you cope with the emotional impact of living with CRPS, such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)
