“I don’t want to live this life anymore because this is not a life. Being in pain for so long and nobody’s able to do anything to help me,” shares 68-year-old Etobicoke woman Maria Milenkovic.
Maria suffered from chronic pain for nearly three years. It had gotten so bad that at one point she told her doctor she didn’t want to live anymore.
The 68-year-old woman is a retired personal support worker. Back in 2021, she was transferring her elderly neighbour from a wheelchair to a bed but unexpectedly the neighbour hung onto Maria with all her weight. The strain from the incident turned a normally active Maria into someone who could barely move.
Before the accident, Maria used to walk 12 to 13 kilometres daily, exercised regularly, and had a thriving part-time baking business. All of a sudden she was forced to give up everything that she says made her life worth living.
“It would take me 15 to 20 minutes to go from sitting to standing. The pain was unbearable,” says Maria.
In the past three years, Maria received treatment from five physiotherapists, a chiropractor as well as 7 doctors. She paid two visits to the Emergency and fainted twice from the pain.
“I was on morphine. All kinds of medication. I didn’t even know what they gave me. They were just putting so much stuff in me,” says Maria.
Her life became so difficult that she was referred to a pain clinic where she was injected into her spine weely with an anesthetic and steroids.
“I was preparing myself for a wheelchair to be honest,” says Maria who was occasionally using a walker just to get by.
She lost all hope until her son convinced her to go see Eterna Health’s Dr. Sunny Gandhi, a Chiropractor and Neuro Functional Sports Practitioner.
“He told me about Dr. Sunny and I was kind of skeptical. If nobody else can help me, how can he do it?” shares Maria.
“She was diagnosed with having sciatica as well as arthritis in the spine. We determined the sciatica diagnosis was incorrect within the first appointment,” shares Dr. Sunny. “We worked on the radiating pain she had in her leg, which was actually from her hip. We fixed both her hips, gave her exercises to reinforce that to keep all of the changes permanent.”
Dr. Sunny says Maria had fatty infiltration in her deep spinal muscles, which happens with chronic low back pain. Dr. Sunny trained the deep spinal muscles as well as the more surface level spinal muscles.
“We created space within the segments of the spine. At Eterna Health we have a machine at the clinic that allows us to do very specific training used by a lot of high level athletes in the world. This is not known to a lot of people,” says Dr. Sunny.
Two months later and after six treatments, Maria has gone from describing her pain as a 15 out of 10 down to 0.
“Being pain-free, my life is back! It’s like I am born again,” shares a smiling Maria. “I can walk, do my baking, and run around. He is an amazing person and amazing as a doctor,” says Maria.
