Wracked with relentless and agonising pain, TV host Osher Günsberg had no tolerance for even the smallest frustration. Unfortunate but accepted complications from hip replacement surgery had developed into a chronic pain condition in 2020.
He constantly wore an angry expression on his face and even the slightest touch would force him to flinch from those he loved – his wife, Audrey Griffen, and children, Georgia, now 20, and Wolfgang, now 5.
“It was really difficult to live with me,” he admits to WHO of that time. “When I was dealing with this stuff, and it was getting incrementally worse every day, I would walk around with an expression like, ‘What the f–k did you just say!’ written on my face.
“My level of tolerance for any kind of frustration was so low because of the noise in my head, just trying to breathe, and even the smallest thing would be incredibly difficult to deal with. It was getting really bad. My relationship was going to fall apart.”
Fearing he could lose his family, Günsberg, 50, had to get help. But for him, pain medication was not an option. Having battled addiction in the past, which included abusing painkillers, he was determined to protect more than a decade of sobriety.
“As a sober person, I have to be very mindful of that because that is a slippery slope,” he explains of how he began to seek out alternatives to manage his pain.
Looking beyond conventional treatment saw Günsberg, who is just one of nearly 3.6 million Australians who suffer from chronic pain, discover how new science, medications and technological innovations are being used to treat and manage pain.
That personal investigation became the subject of a documentary, Osher Günsberg: A World of Pain.
“I couldn’t catch my breath, the pain was so bad,” he tells WHO. “I was in agony. My wife would roll over in bed and her leg would just brush the hair on my shin and it felt like she hit me with a cheese grater. Flinching away from your wife’s loving embrace is not good for your relationship – trust me on that.
“But that signal was invented by my brain. People need to know the kind of stuff that I’ve discovered, like where pain meds play a role and where other things play a role. We have this perception of what pain is and we will do absolutely everything we can to avoid it, but we might not realise that in doing so we might be making it worse.”
Günsberg says Audrey, who he met while working on The Bachelor in 2014, was like a “North Star” for him as he learned to manage his pain.
Audrey is incredibly compassionate and she was able to go, ‘You are not this pain, this pain is something else,’” he explains. “Being able to separate the pain from the person was enormously powerful. I wish everybody had someone like that but you can be that for yourself, too.
“I’m in pain now and my last surgery was two years ago, but because of what I learned during this experience, I can be with it. I’m not going to let it stop me doing what I’m doing.”
