I have been going to the University of Washington Center for Pain Relief for about 9 months now. I wanted to get off the narcotic drugs and the supportive medications. Narcotics have caused my memory to deteriorate and have caused a lot of other weird things to happen to my body, but mostly the memory issues.
I also have sleep apnea. But that’s a story for another blog entry. You’ll find it in here as soon as I finish typing up this one and do a bit of research so I can explain things in my blog… yes, yes, I do like to teach. Must be that early stint in teaching at the Community College level, where I taught Introduction to Computers for two years, with a one day workshop of HTML taught by Keith.
Back to the Pain Clinic. Getting off the narcotics is important, but I didn’t realize how much pain my body was in, until I used the lidocaine patches (hereafter referred to as ‘pain’ patches for pain relief. Problem is, those are EXPENSIVE. And right now, I don’t have an alternative. The Center for Pain Relief didn’t give me one. Which pisses me off.
On the shoulder injury, I have badly bruised the rotator cuff muscles, but my doctor at the Center for Pain Relief says it’s not a rotator cuff injury, because I bruised the muscle. Um, that’s what the rotator cuff is, a group of muscles. This woman has just lost all credibility in my eyes.
Dr. Zang said the x-rays showed no injury, but to be sure, they need to do an MRI. However, there’s a problem with that, I am disabled due to Cerebral Palsy. I have an intrathecal drug pump. And the ITB pump is a hockey puck sized disc made of metal. Metal and Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) do not mix.
As for the pain, I got injections of steroids in my knees and my shoulder. I am keeping a pain diary for the knees, not the shoulder. Good thing, the shoulder still hurts, but the knees are barely a 1 on a scale of 1-10, 7 hours later.
This might actually work out… if it works out, then I’ll get shots into my knee and be relatively pain free. Well, the next step is to freeze the nerve and basically kill it… it grows back 8-24 months later (although, another piece of literature says 8-12 months). Even then, being pain free from this for 12 months is a lot better than what I have now!
So now I wait to see when they will schedule a follow up. I hope it’s soon..