My c-spine acting up again... (discography results)

[phylly]

Mark,
I AM SO SORRY!!!!! It is such a bummer. Can you move forward with your surgery? I hope the medrol pack helps for awhile. Take care and try to rest.
Phylly

[Terry Allen Blackburn]

You MRI sounds like it's no wonder you are in pain. I hope that the non-surgical stuff you are doing helps so that you can put off the surgery as long as possible. Hang in there.

No one will do this as a professional courtesy for you with the amount of referrals you send their way?

Terry Newton

[Maria]

Hey Mark,
I'm glad you were able to get something to help you with your pain/flare up/whatever you're calling it after seeing the report...

My neck is really bothering me today after being at the hairdresser's on Thurs and extending my neck back over the sink then just bad positioning to watch TV I guess and Lola pulling so much while walking..

Anyway, what I have on my MRI is nothing and I feel super crappy today~ I mean nearly able to function w/this type of pain so I'm blown away you've made it this far w/o surgery... dang!

Glad you got a PCP that sounds really good and I imagine loves having as interesting and medically well versed a patient as yourself, esp in an HMO setting.

take care and hope the prednisone packs do the trick for a while.

[mmglobal]

Yesterday was day 4 of the dose-pack. It's been quite a struggle lately, but l came home yesterday evening feeling pretty good for the first time in quite a while. Zoey (granddaughter turning 2 later this month) was in her usual great mood and I was feeling good enough to chase her around and have a blast. After a short while it was clear that I was making a mistake. After a couple of hours... it really hit. All the gains from the dose-pack gone, and then some. Things have continued to advance today... symptoms rising to new levels. The most disconcerting issue is the numbness on L face is going past mild numbness and has been painful. Chest/arm pain have been crushing at times.

There may be an interesting discussion here. We hope that medications will relieve our symptoms so we may be more functional. In my current situation, I believe that I have a relatively new issue that comes with a substantial inflammatory process. Does medicating and regaining function allow me to further aggravate the problem, actually making things worse? Obviously, it's the activities, not the meds, but in this case, the activities are so benign, I'm not sure how I might have known what was too much? Hopefully, by the time I figure this all out, things will have settled down.

Thoracic MRI will be done Monday morning. That will tell a huge story. I'll keep you posted.

Mark

[fuzzy]

Good luck on the Thoracic MRI. I hope they don't find anything like the stuff they found my t spine that I wish I never would have known about.


I am still working on my file, Mark, just having trouble getting that paperwork I still need.

[Maria]

Mark,
As you know I've been on long term low dose use of Methadone for LBP and Neurontin and the wonderful ESIs that WC hardly wants to authorize...

Ok so if I were covering this pain and then flaring it up and my MRI results showed significant deterioration over a short period of time or even a longer period of time and then the pain/flare ups were becoming more nasty even tho I utilized meds to calm down the worse of it.. I believe I would have had surgery by now.

Fact is most of the time I've felt fairly well controlled given that I don't do much must factor in as well but I needed to feel really really bad like I did in the old days before entering into another surgery or see that my MRI/CT/discogram whatever testing is correlating with my symptoms for me to move on to surgery.

If the meds just cover acute flare ups but one is worsening both symptomatically and via diagnostic testing that seems to be reason to move on to surgery if it is warrented.

Now my neck is different story. I took 3 Fioricets and 1 skelaxin last night and still couldn't sleep for cervical pain. Today I feel like crap. But my MRI just shows an insignificant bulge at C5/6 according to the OSS.

This sucker hurts bad when it flares up...

Is this crushing arm and chest pain a new symptom?? It seems to be something you'd better mention to both the spine doc's you're consulting w/as well as you're PCP and maybe something you'd be best having checked out at Urgent Care or the ER (I know you were just there..). Have you had a recent EKG or any cardiac testing (I know you said these symptoms can be part of the cervical picture)... just don't want you to miss anything because you are *sure* it's all cervical/thoracic spine dx going on.. I don't mean to overstep any boundries as I recognize that you have Diane in your corner and she would push you to anything she thought necessary re the symptoms.

[dshobbies]

Mark,

I totally agree with the possibility of meds doing more harm than good. Already disabled with limited function, I medded myself up for a wedding where I danced a little too much. It put me over the edge and I became 100% disabled with no function at all. Then I found you