VERY bad day for CJ

[cjsmith]

I went to the Stanford Pain Clinic this afternoon. The guy diagnosed me with something something neuritis (I'll get a copy of the full report when the typists are done with it), which he says is under the umbrella of CRPS (although not by any means a bad case).

He says there are several things we can try:
- Medication, which is not likely to work
- Some kind of funky spinal stimulation thing, which is not likely to work
- A sympathetic nerve block, which might or might not give partial relief for three hours or three weeks
- Injecting Botox (into the nerve?), which is not likely to work and which "there is no way your insurance will pay for"
- Surgical or mechanical interventions, which not only likely won't work but could make things REALLY WAY WAY WAY WORSE

So I might get partial relief from an expensive and uncomfortable procedure that would, if it lasts long enough to be worth it, have to be repeated over and over forever.

This is it. End of the line. No more hope for miracle cures, or even nonmiracle cures, or ever having a normal life again.

Comments

[extra300.livejournal.com]

I don't know what your problem is other than it seems to deal with incurable pain. I can't offer much other than sympathy and I do offer that except this, my father had a problem with back pain when due to age his spinal discs collapsed. There's not much can be done for this, but he went to an acupuncturist who after a few treatments got rid of the pain. The pain stayed gone until he died. Acupuncture is not a cure, but it is an anesthetic.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's basically it. My feet hurt, my feet haven't stopped hurting since late 2003, and I loved running and hiking and backpacking. I also deeply value being an independent, self-sufficient person. Nobody tells you, when you get a diagnosis like this, that the hardest part isn't learning how to make all the endless accommodations in your daily life; the hardest part is convincing yourself that your core values are no longer sustainable and must be jettisoned.

Thanks for the idea, by the way. Research shows acupuncture is only occasionally and temporarily effective for CRPS, and sometimes the microtrauma kicks the CRPS into its bad mode (permanent or random pain rather than activity-based pain). I'm going to be awfully darn cautious about lots of things for a while. But if it looks like I'm not at risk of kicking over into the bad mode, I definitely want to try acupuncture.