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The report is about my 59-year-old dad, who is right-handed.

From the age of 23 he suffered from recurring pains from the right foot to the hip. It soon became a constant pain and nobody could help him.
At the age of about 25 he was diagnosed with "Bechterew's disease". He was told that he can live with this condition, but that it only gets worse with age.
According to my dad, the pain only got worse from then on. He was given medication, participated in various programs specifically for this condition, and suffered more and more every year.
The pain and stiffness went up over the years and had reached the neck. The worst was when it affected the chest area, those were the worst years. So my dad lived with this pain and the diagnosis from the age of 23 until he was 59.

I have to say that I met my dad again in the summer of 2021 for the first time in 25 years. And since I already knew Germanic a bit, I really wanted to find out what the reason for all that was back then. We sat down and talked about it. I asked him if he could remember when and where the pain first started.
He told me that he remembered that very well. At that time, the pain in the right toe started and went up the leg to the hip. I asked him if he did something he might keep banging his right toe on. He then told me the following:

At the age of 23 he was working underground. A few months before the pain first appeared, he did further training in his field so that he no longer had to do what I call dirty work.
In any case, he and his work colleague were assigned a job where they had to lay several meters of electrical cables along the wall underground, standing on a steel cable for 6 hours a day - water underneath them. He said that his right leg, foot and hip hurt terribly after work.
I asked him how he felt about it. He said he thought he wasn't going to get through this (low self esteem leg/hip conflict). He was also so annoyed that he had to do this work (motor conflict on the toe, having to do these movements while balancing on the wire), although he had completed the training so that he did not have to do such work.
At some point the manager came up with a solution and so the two of them no longer worked balancing on the steel cable, but on a construction made of boards lying on top of it.

I asked him after he told me all this if he had ever spoken to anyone about it. He said: "No, never, except now with you".
I explained to him that I believe his pain stems from this incident and that two years later, when he was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, he entered a self-perpetuating vicious cycle of localized self-esteem slumps and motor conflicts.

He listened to everything in peace, went home and slept. The next day he told me that for the first time in 36 years he could feel his right toe again. On the second day he was able to move his toe again. Also, he slept very badly. At this point he was taking a lot of medication, one being a morphine precursor for the pain, then shots to slow the progression of the disease, etc.
Over the next few days and weeks he got better and better, the pain lessened. It no longer took him an hour after waking up in the morning to get up without falling over, so the morning stiffness improved as well. Some day he gave up the painkillers. Months later, he dropped the other medications as well. He's so glad to have put it all behind him. He told me that over the years he had met a man whose "disease" suddenly stopped on its own and the doctors couldn't explain it. They wanted to turn this man upside down at the time to find out how it came about.

Report translated by: Monique Hetfeld