I'm also not sure what to think. I'm now in my third year of anal pain, of varying intensity, and have still not found a path towards relief or resolution. Have been diagnosed with anal fissure, but can't seem to find a physician or CRS who can definitively tell me what's actually wrong - i.e. why doesn't it heal and just go away. In the second year of the pain I was told by an out of hours doctor at the local hospital that my pain was something that couldn't be treated by physical methods, and advised to seek psychotherapy. I now see a therapist once a week, and have found this helpful, though it hasn't stopped the pain. I have also been on pregabalin (Lyrica) for two years now, and have also found that helpful, though again it hasn't blocked the pain entirely.
I read an interesting
article by a practising GP about how doctors respond, or fail to respond, to physical pain in their patients. Why is it so hard for doctors and patients to cope with chronic pain? he asks.
We are naturally solution-focused and the stories doctors like to tell about our work and our patients like to tell about their illnesses is a ‘restitution narrative’ in which illness is overcome and good health restored. We find it difficult to describe alternative narratives and this leaves us and our patients with chronic pain deeply frustrated. Doctors who cannot make their patients better, or even relieve their symptoms, suffer crises of identity and purpose and seek to avoid the situations that make us feel like this.
I had a real struggle with my last GP over this and related issues: he wanted above all to establish that I had some clearly identifiable physical illness - whether it was Crohn's, or UC, or prostatitis, or even cancer - and after several months of seeing me and sending me for hospital tests and examinations became exasperated and even angry that none of these explorations led to any firm conclusion, beyond the fact that I had suffered and was suffering from chronic anal fissures. In the end, after he had begun to prescribe anti-depressants for me, I left him and changed doctors. Now, if I want to actually see my new doctor I have a 4-week wait, though I can talk to her on the phone. It's not really satisfactory, but in some ways it's better than when I was constantly going to the surgery (or the emergency services) with my pain, desperately hoping that some cure could be found.
Gradually I've had to come to terms with the realisation that there may be no cure for this affliction I've somehow contracted. The symptoms and the pain are real - I have recurring fissures, which can be seen and treated with GTN, etc., but the consensus of the doctors and specialists I've seen appears to be that I will have to learn to live with them, and that surgical intervention will do more harm than good in the case of a 72-year-old like myself.
I'm sorry that this is all about myself - but I thought that at least by describing my own experience it might help you with coping with yours. Though there may not be a complete solution, at least there's the knowledge that one isn't alone, and that the pain of the condition, though often miserable, is something that can be survived, thought about, shared, and even confronted.