Spontaneous improvement?

[mmglobal]

Those of you that have followed my case know that for the past 2.5 years, I've been dealing with chronic t-spine pain. I've had successful diagnostic injections that seemed to identify painful costovertebral joints. (where the rib head joins the vertebrae) I have had the nerve ablations that were indicated by the injections with no help. My last set of injections were in July and they were very dramatically positive. Unfortunately, the trip home from Europe undid all of the benefit of the injections was undone and I’ve been way worse since then. From July to March was awful.

It has been very discouraging. I’m headed back to Europe soon, but don’t know if I’ll be following through with the more aggressive ablations. About 3 weeks ago… Friday night was a typical HORRIBLE evening. Saturday morning, I woke up and walked into the bathroom. I felt soooo much better. Not just lower pain levels, but I actually felt good! I still had bouts of pain, but overall, I was much improved for over a week. Then, I had a setback, but did not get to be anywhere nearly as bad is it had been before the spontaneous improvement. Since then, I’ve been up and down, but still way better than I have been in so many months.

If I’m still trending better, I will not have the more aggressive ablations that are the next likely step. There is a very high risk of getting a permanent band of numbness that wraps around my chest. I experienced this on a temporary basis after the first round of ablations and it is not pleasant. I’ll be happy to risk it, but only if the good trend stops.

I’m posting this not only because I’m way overdue for updating the community, but because I want to start a discussion about spontaneous improvement. I’ve seen many people through the years who are severely disabled for years and years. Many of them have improvement kind of sneak up on them. They suddenly realize that they have experienced very surprising, substantial improvement. In most instances of this that I’ve seen, the patients don’t get to be great… but they get to be so much more functional then they ever thought they would be.

We get to a place where our problems cannot be addressed by the medical community and we are resigned to a life in pain. Because the source of this pain seems to be observable mechanical problems, we believe that it will only get worse and we have no hope. In some cases, the improvement comes when irritated mobile tissues become immobilized. (Auto fusion?) In other cases, it may occur because we get better at managing our pain and disability and are simply coping better, even though our pain is not improved. I’m sure that there are many different reasons for this and that there may be some cases that will never be understood.

Anyone have this occur or know anyone who has been to the edge of total disability, then unexpectedly get much better?

Mark