Pain free - yippee

I have been living with chronic pain. It drives you crazy. There is no relief, it is just there all the time. It is all related to a netball injury from years ago in which I destroyed my anterior cruciate ligament. Since then there has been a knee reconstruction and various other interventions to help me manage the pain of the resulting arthritis in my knee. A dreadful limp for many years did damage to my spine.

I had a total knee replacement several years ago. And within a short time my back started to ache badly. Then the sciatic nerve pain started. Unrelenting, searing pain down my back and right leg. It had been there for years, apparently, but had been masked by the intense pain in my knee from the arthritis eating away at my bones. And so it has gone on - and on, and on ...
Daytime has been manageable but night time is a nightmare. No position is comfortable. I toss and turn. I can't get comfortable. Anti-inflammatory drugs don't work. When I manage to get to sleep it is fitful and I wake an hour or so later and start the tossing and turning all over again. I have become friends with night-time radio. In the mornings I wake in a fog. I have no energy. I am tired and cranky and fed up. Losing weight and getting fit has brought no relief. It was time to do something. A neuro-surgeon told me 5 years ago that I needed a spinal fusion. My reaction was thank you but no thanks. Not yet, at least. The surgery didn't worry me but the 6-month rehab did. All up I have already spent 2 years in rehab after knee surgeries so I am not much interested in spending more time in that little land of misery.

I have been seeing a physio every fortnight for treatment. A few weeks ago she noticed some changes in my back and some new tender spots and suggested I have a chat with my doctor as it had been some years after my last scan. That  chat with my doctor led me to a nuclear scan, a less-than pleasant exercise that showed bad news about my facet joints. It was time to try something else -the pain wasn't in my mind and it was getting worse.

I had a cortisone injection in my hand for carpel tunnel some years back and that gave me relief but it only lasted only three weeks. It was in my mind as a back-up plan for my back (no pun intended) but I had heard that you could only have 3 cortisone treatments in your spine before they stopped working. So I had been saving them up so that I could have them when I really needed them. I realised that time was now!

I had a cortisone injection in my spine yesterday - actually, several injections but I won't bore you with the details. And OMG - I am pain free for the first time in more than 20 years! There is just a little gripe going on, but that I can live with.
 
Not sure how long this will last - somewhere from 1 day to 1 year from what I have read - but boy was it worth the expense. Yippee! Now I have absolutely no reason for being cranky - of course, I don't always need a reason!