Sandra Orr trained as a nurse in the Adelaide Hospital, Dublin and later as a midwife in the South of England. Following her training she worked overseas - first treating the civilian population in war-torn Iraq in the 1980s, later with refugees in the Sudan and then as a midwife in Tunisia.
This exciting and fulfilling life was, however, cut short by serious bouts of back pain which later resulted in her retiring prematurely at the age of 37.
"I got my first sniff of back trouble in 1992 and was home for five months with a prolapsed disc in my lower back," she explains. Although she returned to her work in Tunisia, she had to curtail outreach work due to the pain she suffered on the bumpy road journeys to the rural clinics.
In 1994, further tests showed she had a severely degenerated lumber spine and bulging discs due to repetitive lifting injuries at work. She kept taking anti-inflammatory medications and avoiding the surgical route due to the risks and poor success rate.
However, in 1998, she could no longer function. "I came to a grinding halt just two days before I was due to go overseas again. I spent the next three months in bed with excruciating pain and, together with my consultant, decided to take the risk of surgery."
In August 1998, she had back surgery. However, the following Christmas, she "coughed and sneezed her disc out again when sick with the flu".
Sandra underwent a second more radical surgical procedure in which her disc and bone in the vertebrae were removed in April 1999. Sadly, this didn't solve her problem either and she has spent the past five and a half years seeking various solutions to her chronic pain condition.
"Chronic pain undermines so much of your life. You suffer from loneliness, isolation, lack of confidence, and are sometimes pushed to the point of despair. Chronic pain stripped me of all my securities - my job, my profession, my social and sporting activities, my health, my emotional energy and my financial security and left me standing naked to contemplate what's to come.
"I realised after I had the second surgical intervention that I wouldn't be pain-free but now I'm back on my feet with pain as part of my life. I'm a very positive person in the midst of all this darkness and my faith as a Christian has been very important to me. I am also attending a pain management programme and avail of complementary therapies and I now have the view that all this must be leading me somewhere."
Together with some other chronic pain sufferers, Sandra set up the patient action group, Positive Pain Power, which is working towards better recognition and services for chronic pain sufferers.
"I feel I could have been sorted out in two to three years if access to treatment had progressed on a more acceptable time scale. Chronic pain sufferers are considered low priority on the treatment ladder," she says.
Meanwhile, Sandra hasn't given up hope for some resolution to her chronic pain.
"I had spinal cord stimulation [also known as neuromodulation, this involves the blocking of the pain signal from the site of injury to the brain] in 2001 to relieve my pain but it didn't work. I am now scheduled to have a more advanced form of this treatment [in 2005\]. All of this is to help me manage my pain more satisfactorily in the future. Only then can I fully realise a quality of life with meaning and purpose."