00:00Jade Guest enjoys the sunshine whenever she can.
00:06The Esperance mother of two has spent the past year battling debilitating pain.
00:10I just woke up, it was a Monday morning and I was like, oh my goodness, I'm in a lot of pain.
00:15By night time, most of the time I'm on the couch crying.
00:17Despite multiple trips to Perth, no doctors were able to provide answers.
00:22Well, I was pretty much depressed because I was so searching for an answer that no one was giving me.
00:27The 42-year-old says she was rejected twice from the WA Health Department's Central Referral Service,
00:34designed to triage cases, and hospitals stopped calling her back.
00:38I'm in the too hard basket.
00:40Very frustrating, I feel like they've definitely failed her.
00:43Fed up with the lack of answers, Jade joined social media support groups and sought out pain experts all over the world.
00:50Finally, she found an East Coast doctor who discovered a Gore-Tex mesh inserted into her chest during a battle with bone cancer 20 years ago was deteriorating.
01:01He said he can get it out for me, but now the problem is what are we going to, how are we going to rebuild my chest wall?
01:07While the waiting continues, she's relieved to have a way forward.
01:10If I hadn't have taken this into my own hands, I would be still waiting, waiting for the doctors to help me.
01:15Around 400,000 West Australians suffer chronic pain, with rural residents disproportionately impacted.
01:22Unfortunately, it's one of the areas where we see people having to convince the clinicians that they're working with that their pain is real.
01:30In a statement, the WA Health Minister, Meredith Hammett, says the system aims to provide high quality care to all West Australians,
01:37no matter the severity of their condition.
01:39She says they'll continue working to advance the care provided.
01:42With surgery now on the horizon, Jay Guest is trying to live life to the fullest.
01:47I can't do, yeah, I can't do my normal life.
01:49A brave face masking a painful struggle.
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