Two Epidural Shots

 The day before yesterday I got two steroid epidurals in the right L3 and L4 spots. I had NO lumbar pain yesterday! So far today I have no lumbar pain. 

I have had at least 20 epidurals over several years and this is the true first time that I think they worked. I so so so do hope that this lack of pain continues. I love it. 

I swam in the beach yesterday--easy stuff--kicking on my back with fins--rehabbing the back little by little. No back problems at all in a vigorous swim through some rough surging waves. I walked back to the car straight up and pain free. I'll probably get in the water later today.

I don't know if this means that the needle and medicine landed in the exact nerve spots that needed to be treated. I do know that I had brief extreme nerve pain that radiated down my right leg when the 2 shots were being injected. I'm talking a few seconds of intensity, then back to okay. I always get the little bit of midazolam and fentanyl IV.  

I wonder if other patients have had that experience of the sensation that the doctor hit the best spot. Usually I have a sensation that the needle and medicine is in the general area.

Maybe the fluoroscopy view is better sometimes than others; maybe things shift around back there. Well, I'm sure that there IS shifting around because pain areas vary from hours to hours and from days to days.

Enough of my pain-free rambling.  

I am so angry today with these pinched up & compressed nerves in my spinal cord & the spinal offshoots from my lumbar back!

 I began this post February 6th and left it in 'draft' status. I'll return to publish it today, Saturday the 15th.

I took 4 days off from exercise due to my back killing me and driving me nutso. I don't want to get another fusion surgery, but I'm going to continue to go nuts with despair and depression, or give the surgery a shot, in the pursuit of substantial pain relief.

Pain really does ruin life. And it's invisible, save for an observable limp or leaning into a cane, or the grimaced distortion on the face of the victim.

It butts in on everything you are doing or want to do. It wears on the love and compassion of one's immediate family. Empathy of a family can only stretch so far. Easily ten years of observing the limitations of a broken person is far too long. It's not decent to ask family to tolerate being exposed to one's daily pill counting, always needing to pace out prescriptions so as not to be too much of a chronic bother to clinic staff and prescribers.

I feel badly every doggone day at home when I sit the day away trying to attain a partially comfortable position in a recliner chair. I am sorry that my family has to see me like this. Surely, they must want to holler at me to 'Shut the heck up; I can't stand your whining.'

I'm hurting severely today. I have the muscle relaxant, the anti-anxiety Rx, and the much-maligned opiate on board. Typically, they give me a couple of pain-free hours between doses. No, not pain free. Just pain-tolerable. That's every day! 

This protracted affliction of ours is nothing less than torment. My personal lowlight is the compression on both sides of my L-3 and L-4 discs. Nerves that fire into causing stabbing spasms in the areas are routine with me. Primarily, my right side is most problematic, but my left side also gets its own time to torture me as well. Often the nerve pain is duller and pressuring me on both sides. When no medication combination touches it, I use TENS patches with some low voltage stuck on the areas to distract me. I use ice packs daily. I use elastic lumbar supports most of the day and evening but not at bedtime. Over the wide elastic support, I often strap on the hard post-op big lumbar support. I regularly slip an ice pack in under the supports. 

On a day like today, I get aggravated and start to think about punching walls. The frustration and anxiety that accompany nerve pain put me in an extremely foul loss of patience with the whole problem that rules my life.

Those of you with related issues with the endless nerve pain know what I write about. The dog wants to be walked but I may not be up for it for several days. An event or family gathering may be scheduled but I usually have to pass. Any thoughts of taking a long car ride somewhere I flat out avoid. 

I've written too much today, so I'll end it here.

***

I just heard dog barking and walked out to the backyard...we get coyotes roaming beyond our fence and they would eat a small dog like ours if they could in a minute. In the sky, just before 5:30 pm Pacific, I saw a second stage of another Spacex rocket zipping quietly very high across our sky; it must have launched from Vandenberg ten minutes ago. It has become a frequent event here.

CHRONIC PAIN -- It Never Stops

 I think the diagnosis of chronic pain, per the medical criteria, is pain lasting six weeks. I didn't just google it. I'm recalling the definition from reading over many years about it.

The meager definition leaves a great deal to be desired in support of the pain patient whose pain is lifelong.  Surely, the medical bureaucrats and academics and rule-making organizations could and should do a better job of categorizing patients.

Over years I have thought of my broken body parts--structural parts of the body--discs, bones, and nerves in endless possible scenarios.

I often think of an insect that one steps on. Maybe you hear a cracking sound but the insect escapes. It is certainly broken in some manner but gets away from you before you can finish it off. THEN I liken my body to the sturdy insect. I was stepped on, in a manner of speaking, and have had to persevere in living with my broken structural parts. These parts cannot be truly fixed and returned to 'factory condition.'

It has been a strong and depressing struggle with doctors, insurance barriers, referrals & prior authorizations to obtain treatments and injections, prescriptions & surgeries, support braces and official recognition of disabilities. Conservatively, the past fifteen years of my life have been dominated by these health matters. 

Why is this the norm?