About Pain

For much of the past ten years, I have been in pain.  It started out as pain that could be medicated with OTC remedies, or a hot Jacuzzi bath.  In 2005/06, I reinjured the disks in my back.  I tried to work through it, but it became agonizing to get through a day's work, and I quit a physically demanding job to go back to teaching.  I won't suggest that teaching is a physically demanding job, although good teachers try to entertain, as well as teach, so big gestures can get tiring.  I was beginning to look like a 90 year-old, all bent over and such.  One day, at Church, a guy named Dave Gover came up and asked what was wrong with my back.  I told him that I had bulging disks at L5-S1, and was having some of the worst sciatic pain I had ever experienced.

The question caught me unprepared, I knew a little about Dave, like that he was a doctor, and worked at David Grant, but I had no idea what his specialty was, so it came out of right field.  "How would you like to be pain-free for up to 90 days?"  The look on my face should have told him that I was beyond shocked.  I said something to the effect of kissing something in public, and allowing him a half hour to draw a crowd...

From that point on, Dr. Gover helped guide me to get the referrals I needed to get into the Interventional Radiology Clinic, and I was introduced to a procedure known as an Epidural Steroid Injection, or ESI.  Using fluoroscopic imaging, the doctor inserts a small needle up next to the spine near the bulging disk, and bathes it in a solution that contains a steroid that actually shrinks the disk, taking pressure off the sciatic nerve.  In my case, they do it bilaterally, meaning they do both sides of the spine.

The first time, despite the fact that the doctor who did it (not Gover) stuck the needle into my sciatic nerve, causing me to levitate for a second or two, I felt better as soon as the lidocane shots were administered.  Lidocane takes some getting used to, after several ESI's, I no longer feel like screaming when the doctors numb the area, but it still burns.  The effect lasts as long as the lidocane does, and as it wears off, the pain level goes back up.  That scared the heck out of me, at first, because the original doctor, they called him EZ, told me that someday, these shots would no longer work.  Now days, I don't panic, because within a few days, the pain level will go way down.  After seven and a half years, I know the routine.  Using the hospital's pain scale of 1 to 10, with 1 the least pain, and 10 the worst, it goes something like this:

On the morning of the ESI, my back pain is somewhere between 8 and 10, depending upon how well I slept.  After the lidocane, it goes to 1, until the lidocane wears off, and the pain level goes back up to 6, or 7, or sometimes even 8/9.  Over the next two or three days, the steroid will begin to shrink the disk, and the pain goes down to 5.  Since I have arthritis in the same area, a 5 is about as good as it gets, even though I take Norco 325/5 every 4 to 6 hours, as needed.  I stay there, for the most part, so I have learned a little about pain management.

I'm the only person I know who can hurt himself sleeping.  Seriously, we've tried everything from Air to Waterbeds, and things that would never occur to Normal people.  We finally settled on a memory foam over coils hybrid we got at Matthew's over on Orange Dr.  Mattresses, pillows, mattress coverings of foam, memory foam, and egg crate foam, we have tried everything.  Mary, from necessity, has learned to sleep on her right side, so she can hear.  Up until the cancer surgery, I snored, pretty badly, most nights.  I don't know what happened, or even if there is any proven relationship between the removal of part of a lung and a reduction in snoring, but over the past 18 months, Mary stays in bed with me on most nights, so I know it has abated quite a bit.  No matter what we've tried, even the major makers of air and foam bedding who claim that their air/foam will reduce back pain, but give you a bunch of crap when you inform them that it didn't.

Right now, I am 2 1/2 weeks from my next procedure (ESI), and the sciatica is beginning to return to my left side, so the right can't be far behind.  My pain level has risen to about six, so this is the beginning.  By the time of my procedure, it will be at 9.  This is not a particularly good time to be me.

I don't claim to know very much about the origin of pain, but I could probably write a book about the effects of pain on the body, and the mind.  Most of the time I try to joke about it, particularly when I go to Church, and people ask how I am doing.  I could be honest:  "Just f-ing great.  I didn't have to worry about having died in my sleep, 'cause I woke up in pain.  If I ever woke up without it, I'd have a heart attack."  But I take the easy way out and say, "I'm getting on as best I can."  Which usually gets a, "We'll keep you in our prayers."

What a great sentiment, "We'll keep you in our prayers," particularly if you happen to believe in the power possessed by a single, earnest prayer.  Sometimes I wonder, though, if they're praying for me to get worse; but that's just me, getting in the way of my own redemption.   I do, by the way, believe in the power of prayer, and in the existence of a power far superior to our own, whom I choose to call God, that can intervene on our behalves, even to the point of miracles.  I have seen too many, heard (on good authority) of many more.  I have had a couple happen in my own life.  Little ones, to be sure, but I have been married for more than 41 years to a woman I still love deeply, and that is a miracle.