Andrea Hayes’s eyes well up as she recalls one of the most difficult moments in her battle with chronic pain.

“It’s still really raw for me,” she admits, grabbing a napkin to wipe away a tear that has slipped involuntarily down her cheek at the memory.

Andrea had gone to the GP hoping to start weaning herself off her pain medication, but instead had been given a prescription for another tablet for a spasm in her back; despite doing everything in her power – including stepping back from her career in TV3 – to focus on getting well.

Feeling she was fighting a losing battle, she sat back in her car utterly dejected.

“There was a picture of me on Facebook, and somebody sent me a message saying: ‘You look amazing hon at such and such an event.’ I just broke into tears thinking: ‘Nobody can see what was going on,’” she says.

And as she watched cars whizz by, it crossed her mind that if she was ever knocked down and suffered visible injuries, people might at least – and at last – understand the agony she was living with every single day with a condition that had already left her “battered and bruised inside”.

“I nearly, for a second, thought: ‘I’ll just open the door and fall out of the car,’” says Andrea. Just then, a church bell rang out. Snapping back, she saw the steeple in the distance and drove in its direction. She’s not sure how long she sat in the church – between tears and prayers – but, as she left, a ray of sunshine pierced the sky; and something shifted.

“It sounds so dramatic,” she smiles. “I just thought: ‘I don’t have to feel like this.’”

And maybe that was a turning point in Andrea’s journey in taking control of her pain, rather than letting pain control her, which she details in her book Pain-free Life: My Journey To Personal Wellness – though she admits that the thought of people reading it petrifies her.

“It’s so personal to me,” she says. “You saw how I got upset earlier on. I don’t want people to know that this goes on behind closed doors; so I’d rather not let people know about my life, but it’s the only way to raise awareness.”

Under pressure

Because, while her bright smile might not betray it, Andrea is almost always in pain – though “pain” is not a word that she likes to use anymore given its negativity, preferring “pressure” or “sensations”.

“Like, at this moment?” we can’t help but ask. She explains that, yes, her coccyx bone is almost in spasm, which is why she shifts subtlety side to side throughout the interview. There’s a shooting feeling down her leg and the top of her neck feels under pressure.

“Today wouldn’t be a great day,” she surmises, sipping her coffee.

For years, however, Andrea felt she had no option but to hide her chronic pain, as she felt that with no definite known cause – or cure – people would not believe her.

Raised in north Dublin, her childhood and teenage years were punctured by periods of ill health: from ear, nose and throat issues to suspected meningitis. When she began to speak up about a pain in her back, she was told it was probably just “women’s problems”, which she coped with by self-medicating with Feminax and Solpadeine.

However, it was only after a snowboarding accident where she broke her wrist – but had more issues with her ongoing backache – that alarm bells started to ring.

“My family just said: ‘Listen, this is just wrong the amount of tablets you are taking because, while we all have pain, you’re taking tablets every day, you’re having pain every day,’” she explains.

“And maybe that’s when I realised that it’s OK to have the odd pain in your back, but I was having it every day.”

Eager to find the cause, she saw a specialist who was convinced that she had PCOS and endometriosis. But when she went for surgery, there was no evidence of either condition.

“I just felt I was abandoned,” she says, explaining that the next few years followed a similar pattern of misdiagnosis and disappointments, without anybody ever addressing the fact that she was in constant pain.

“There was no doctor or GP I ever met who said: ‘You’ve got chronic pain.’ I had never even heard of chronic pain,” she says.

“They never wanted to treat the pain – they just wanted to find what was causing it.”

Andrea persevered to build her career as a presenter with TV3, where she fronted hit shows, Animal A&E and Dublin Airport: Life Stories. However, something as simple as typing up a script or washing her hair could make her almost weak with pain, while she remembers after one long day of shooting being physically unable to remove one of her welly boots.

“But if you can’t pull your welly off, you can’t get your trousers off, so I just had to sleep with my trousers on and one welly on,” she recalls.

More concerning were her fears she might never be able to start a family due to her health, while she also admits there were times that she drank to numb her helplessness.

“You don’t want to deal with it, so I’d drink a bottle of wine every night just so I wouldn’t have to be on the internet Googling it,” she says, explaining that it was hard to feel her life was in control when she had no idea what was going on in her body.

Turning point

A real turning point came, however, when she was referred to Dr Paul Murphy, a consultant in pain medicine, who was the first person that Andrea felt really understood her and explained the concept of neuropathic pain, where the nerve or nerve fibres may be damaged or dysfunctional and produce pain signals where there is no physical pain source.

“Once I had pain, he believed me,” she says simply.

One of the key differences Dr Murphy made was helping to set up a “care bubble” around Andrea of people who also comprehended the complexity of her situation, from her GP and physiotherapist to her Pilates teacher, while she also took part in a pain management programme.

Since then, Andrea has discovered that she has a number of conditions, including disc degeneration in her neck, POT syndrome and a rare neurological condition known as Chiari malformation 1, which means her brain is pressing downwards – that may all be contributing to her chronic pain; though the exact root is still not definite.

However, one of the most important lessons she learned was to not just depend on other people to provide her with the answers, even taking redundancy from TV3 to concentrate on her “wellness journey”.

“I ended up saying: ‘I’m going to give the same focus, discipline, attention and drive that I gave to my career all those years to self care and I’m going to be the best part of me,’” she says.

In the book, Andrea chronicles everything she tried: “If you told me do handstands, I’d do it,” she jokes. But what really helped, included keeping a journal to release her pent-up feelings, was practising positive affirmations such as “every day in every way I’m getting better and better” to combat the pattern of negative self-talk and even studying clinical hypnosis, which she explains as a means of deep relaxation to help cope.

It’s this multi-disciplinary, holistic approach – doctor and patient, body and mind working together – that gives Andrea hope for the future. Indeed, she has recently come off all of her tablets and hopes that this might provide the opportunity to add to her family, having welcomed daughter Brooke in 2011.

She is also returning to work, filling in for Elaine Crowley on TV3’s Midday and fronting a new radio show on Sunshine FM, but gives much of her time to Irish charity Chronic Pain Ireland, who want to see clear, clinical pathways of care put in place for chronic pain, as well as the rollout of pain management courses and centres of excellence nationwide.

Though – as she notes wryly – while she made nearly 60 episodes of a TV show about animals in pain, whenever she tried to pitch a programme about people in chronic pain, nobody wanted to know.

That’s why Andrea hopes her book will encourage others who have suffered in silence to share their stories; though, ultimately, her advice is that, as a patient with chronic pain, you have to trust yourself just as much as you trust the medics.

“Don’t be afraid to challenge people a little bit because you, ultimately, have to live with it at four in the morning when no one else is around,” she says.

“It’s really satisfying being an empowered patient. It’s really satisfying taking the control back.”

For further information, visit www.andreahayes.ie