Many of you will know that this is, quite literally, very close to my heart! It was instrumental in my healing journey because I had relapsing pericarditis, which went on for years. My cardiologist said that it was the most repetitive and largest swelling that he had ever seen in his career as I had about an inch of swelling around my heart!
What is Pericarditis?
So, the term pericarditis breaks down as: peri – around, card – heart, itis – inflammation. There is a sheath around the heart to protect it and pericarditis is the inflammation of that sheath.
It can be a mild irritation and there has been some suggestion that it might be viral, but the jury is still out on that. Some suggest it might be associated with the Epstein-Barr virus, which is something that usually sits dormant in the system from earlier life. That is also a possibility.
My experience with Pericarditis
I had about 14 episodes in a year before I ended up collapsing in a heap on the floor and was carried off to the coronary care unit. I had something called cardiac tamponade – so the heart stopped beating, or rather, it was beating very, very fast until it no longer functioned.
It causes an awful lot of pain.
I went through years where – and I’m not exaggerating – it would take me several minutes to walk up the staircase and then I’d have to lie down, propped up, for probably 15 to 20 minutes before the pain subsided to some tolerable level. I couldn’t work for a couple of months at all.
It was the steroids that saved my life, along with other interventions that brought the swelling down, but the problem was that every time I came off the steroids the swelling came back. So, I had to look inward – physician, heal thyself. Why is my body inflaming itself? I had already been looking at this as a clinician for probably 10 years or so, why is the pericardium feeling like it needs to inflame? Clearly, if it were just inflamed, it should have settled down with the steroids.
A lot like whack-a-mole
Steroids are very useful drugs, but they often push things down and if the reason the tissue is becoming inflamed hasn’t been resolved, then of course, when the suppressant is stopped the inflammation resurfaces.
It is like whack-a-mole – whack it down and it just pops up somewhere else. It might pop up in the same place, or the body may respond if you are not listening and present Crohn’s disease or irritable bowel or something else. Or me, it was a long journey of exploration.
That is where I began to look at the work of a wonderful man, whom I consider a friend, Steve Porges, and his Polyvagal Theory. He looked at how the autonomic nervous system and dysregulation within it, might go on to affect the psycho-neuro-immuno-endocrine system, and cause chronic inflammatory states.
I went through probably about nine years of good psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, exploring early life experiences.
I also did lots and lots of different somatic training including, most recently, Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing. All the different approaches I have taken have helped deepen my understanding of the psychological and neurological relationship to trauma in the past – including my early surgery (lots of it), aesthetic trauma and relational trauma.
All those things needed to be worked on to bring the system back into balance.
It is working with those psychological traumas that brought the nervous system back into a state of feeling safe, which then turned off the need for “the troops” – also known as the immune system and the hormone system. That defence mechanism was no longer needed.
It took me many years of figuring it out the hard way – long before most of the somatic tools were as available as they are today.
However, I am grateful for that, in a way, because it led me to a very broad and deep understanding of the resolution of chronic pericarditis and other inflammatory conditions, which goes way beyond just understanding the nervous system.
If you have struggled or do struggle with chronic pericarditis, I feel you. It’s disabling. It’s more than pain. It’s an agonizing condition – and very, very scary.
Some people have one episode and it goes away, but there are many people who live with pericarditis as a chronic condition and if you are wondering if I can help you – please reach out.
It would be my absolute honour to try to help you and see whether you can resolve this condition, once and for all.
Rodger Duckworth is a therapist specialising in trauma-informed care for complex chronic pain, autoimmune, and mind-body health conditions, treating the whole person — nervous system, immune system, and psychology together — rather than isolated symptoms.
