Thursday's Child Has Far To Go!

So yesterday I went for my third Sacroiliac Joint Injection. I was not really sweating it due to the fact that the first two had gone pretty well. I was sore afterwards for three to four days but then I felt much better. Well, yesterday for whatever reason, the pain management doctor decided that I needed some extensive injecting done.

Normally they find the right spot, inject and get out. It takes less than 5 minutes from start to finish. Painful and some pressure, well yes. Unbearable, not hardly. Yesterday he kept prodding and prodding with his catheter. I kept feeling him moving and injecting, moving more and injecting some more.

Me being the poor paranoid soul that I am due to the fact that they had yet AGAIN put the wrong procedure on my consent form and we had to get that all straightened out before I could go back to the surgery area, started panicking, thinking is he doing the other procedure? This should not take that long!

So I piped up and said what is going on? Why is this taking so much longer than before? You are doing the SI injection right? He assured me that he was doing the correct procedure but he wanted to give me some extra coverage that he had not done before. He then proceeded to ask me some questions about my symptoms again. I told him yes that my leg did go numb, yes my leg pain was much worse than my back pain. He asked had I had an EMG done?

I said yes but it had been several years ago before my last surgery. He wanted to see the reports. He then tells me that he feels strongly that the hardware in my back is pressing on the sciatic nerve and the SI joint causing inflammation and irritation and the pain that I am experiencing.

OKIE, ummm DOKIE, ummm so where do we go from here? I talked to him about how long I can expect the SI injection to give me relief. He said maybe weeks maybe months, it is different with each person. He then tells me we may need to go in surgically and remove some of my hardware to stop the pressure especially if there is enough nerve involvement to warrant it.

Needless to say, that was NOT what I wanted to or was ready to hear! He then said we might try a spinal cord stimulator instead as I told him I was not keen on surgery atall. I might do the SCS but still not even sure about it. The last time I researched it, they were averaging about 50% positive results. Not great odds in my book for what you have to go through. They do a trial though so if it did not work, at least I would not have to go through the whole surgery.

I have just joined a yahoo group to hopefully talk to others who have had this done. I hope to be able to find out more about the specifics and what types of experiences other people have had with this.

I was totally miserable with my sciatica yesterday The pain in my hip and leg from the procedure was fierce! I really and truly am not a wimp! That was a very very bad experience! I do feel somewhat better today. I still get some horrible twinges down my leg when I get up and walk or after sitting for any length of time. I am limping pretty badly today. I look like Chester from Gunsmoke! I hope that this goes away soon so I can get some relief.

So if you are reading this, some good thoughts for healing right now and this inflammation getting better soon would be sincerely appreciated!

Decisions, Decisions!

I decided to take some time off to try to enjoy the holidays.I felt I had spent my whole year spinning my wheels, being miserable with my health problems and the aggravation from the insurance company, and very little to show for it. I wanted to have at least some time without worrying all day every day what was to come next. I resumed my search for treatment including new options in late January, 2006. I was happy to find a couple of things that were available to me that I had not really considered before.

One was surgery in Germany I found out that many other people that were in the same boat as me were mortgaging their houses, emptying out 401K's, their savings, taking out loans, etc to finance their way to Germany to have one of the worlds most renowned spine surgeons do the procedure on them. Dr Rudolph Bertagnoli was one of the first surgeons in the world to do this procedure and has done thousands of them over the past 25 years. He takes patients from all over the world on a cash payment basis. Surgery in Germany is considerably less money than it is here. At the time after the money exchange it came out to be around $35,000 for the surgery, trip and stay there. Unfortunately our finances could not stand the additional burden at the time. Now I think back and wish that maybe we had taken the plunge. Of course hindsight is 20/20. I was considering this but it was last on my list due to the financial burden.

I also found out in the meantime that there was a surgeon here in the US that was performing a hybrid surgery one level fusion and one level ADR that was being approved by insurance companies for the most part. The patient might have to pay for the disc itself which cost $4,000 but this was much better in my eyes than paying $35,000 and being out of the country for 3 weeks.

So I found a patient advocate in Mark with Global Patient Network. He helped me get all my records to Dr Fabian Bitan in New York and I consulted with him later. Dr Bitan told me that at the time he felt I was a candidate for the surgery and that he was willing to do it once I was ready to go ahead with the procedure. I was not able to travel to New York until June as no one could care for my children here for two weeks so I had to wait until they were out of school.

In the meantime, I continued going through pain management. One of the things I found that really helped my chronic pain and sciatica was a radio frequency ablation. This is a procedure that is done under sedation where using guided imagery, the physician goes in and burns certain nerves coming out of the disc spaces. This can stop the pain response from going to the brain. It can take anywhere from 6 months to one year to start to grow back so a person can get long term relief from sciatic pain with this. This helped me for a period of about 10 months before I noticed that type of pain coming back again

However, since there were several components to my pain generators, the pain management physician had to use a combination of treatments in order for me to be able to even function during this time.
Image courtesy of kwest19 at stockxpert.com
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