Subluxated costovertabral joint?

[mmglobal]

The last few weeks / months, I've been getting worse and worse. Last week was as bad as ever... couldn't even attend daughter's graduation and a sitting by the pool birthday party.

I should have been posting more... we have been on the trail of seemingly false positive facet injections... now moving on to costovertebral joint diagnostics. I've had one round of injections with the mildly positive result that seems to be more of a Rorschach test... could go either way.

Following my cervical ADR surgery, I had some 'intercostal neuralgia' that responded somewhat to chiropractic. At the time (last May) it was in my sternum. I went bad in September following some PT that was aimed at remobilizing each thoracic segment. While have had some good times since September... it's been 95% bad since then. Most of that time, I've been a shut-in.

Monday I went back to the chiropractor to look into addressing the pain that is in my mid back instead of my sternum as it was last spring. We localized the pain and he adjusted those few levels. There was only one pop heard and I could feel it on the left side where the pain was. The next few hours were amazing. This was as a more dramatic change than any diagnostic or therapeutic injection I've ever had.

After a few hours I started to become sore and the muscle spasms kicked in to return me to much the same pain pattern... just a bit less. Tuesday morning was bad and I had timing of good / bad hours that I'm used to. I'm taking Oxy 20mg 3x and about 60 to 90 minutes after taking one, I feel better for a few hours. As I approach the next dose time, it gets bad again.

Having said that... on Tuesday the good times were MUCH, MUCH better than I'm used to and the bad times were not as bad.

I'm very excited about having made some progress in diagnosing and treating this problem that has been disabling most of the last 9 months. Through the years, I've seen too many of these glimmers of hope... I have to translate the excitement into guarded optimism. It's just a couple of days into this, but this is real progress!