Founder’s Story

Soula Mantalvanos and her husband Theo Mantalvanos own a graphic design company.

In 2007 Soula was working on a design brief for a client when the fit ball she was sitting on exploded. She dropped to a concrete floor – it wasn’t this that caused her excruciating ongoing pain.

Soula had “tried a thousand things” and consulted a great amount of ‘experts’ to try and solve the issue, but for four years, the issue only got worse.

Each time Soula saw a new healthcare professional, she would have to:

• Retell her story — describing her capacities before the accident, restating the injury’s impact on her daily activities, her lifestyle, and her wellbeing.
• Retell her treatment journey — describing the details of the medical tests and treatments in her quest to be pain-free.

Soula found the retelling of her medical history an added trauma. The inability for Soula’s health teams to fully understand Soula’s health story was also the cause of her ongoing pain – she was misdiagnosed.

It was impossible to recall, in sufficient detail, the names of the experts she’d seen, when she saw them, the names of the tests and treatments they carried out, which treatments worked and/or didn’t, the variations on the experimentations, the names of all the medications, the doses, the frequency, etc.

Soula realised that the key to living with and overcoming chronic pain was to take more responsibility (where possible) for its management. For her to do this, she needed the correct system and to trust that her personal information was in her control and would never be used for anything other than for her treatment and care.

So Soula came up with the idea for My Health Story (then PainTrain My Health Summary).

She hopes that her health summarising system will help ease the pain of chronic health management and lead patients and practitioners to better health outcomes.

Read more about Soula’s story at pudendalnerve.com.au