We all have dreams. It may be to get a better house or a family or what ever but we all have them. I have them too but mine are a bit more out of reach. I dream of having pain free days. I have had the dream that they figured out how to replace the spine with a monkey spine and I had it done and now had a tail. ( comes in real handy for scratching while carrying stuff.) I sometimes get realistic and dream of pain free hours instead of days. I know the pain free days are gone.
Is it any wonder those of us who suffer from chronic pain get a bit depressed ? We know our dreams can't come true. Our bubble has been burst for us. We know that no matter what we do our days will be limited by pain for the rest of our lives. Think about that for a moment. Our dreams are out of reach and we know it yet we go on. Day after day we get up and ready ourselves for the fight that is our lives. We struggle to make it through the day with the least amount of pain possible.
Jump on down below the orange snow doodle and we can take a closer look at this.
That is my struggle every day. I try to live a normal life but I can't. It's hard to be normal when you can't always put your own socks on. It's hard to be normal when I drop something and I have to have someone come pick it up for me. So normal for me has changed. My new normal isn't the same new normal for anyone else dealing with chronic pain. We are all different and we all have different triggers for more pain. What is the same in every single one of us is that we continue to struggle on through life.
We have decided not to give up. We try and have normal lives within our new limits. We go to work if we can. We try and go to the store by ourselves. ( Always a fun time asking some complete stranger to help us get something off the bottom shelves. Or asking someone to put something heavy in the cart. ) We try and have fun and go out just like everyone else. Then along comes something that completely screws with our mind.
A few weeks before Christmas I got some really awful news. I had a CT scan done a few weeks before and I got the results on December 8th. To say it was awful is really an understatement. My pain started just over 4 years ago, at least this current batch. bounced from a couple of different doctors trying to find out what was wrong. Finally found out that L4 had collapsed. L5 and S12 were herniated and L3 was showing some damage. I had a fusion from L3 down. They used a newer procedure that didn't use long rods and a hip bone graft. I have 8 rods and screws immobilizing my lower spine. Now I did that to help slow down the degeneration of my spine and give me some more time with less pain. Well 3 Years ago in August I came out of 9 1/2 hours of surgery.Was supposed to be 5 to 6 hours but went much longer. Within days I noticed my pain and numbness were gone. Yeah I had new pain around my spine. Heck my doctor had his fat fingers in there moving stuff around and grinding down bone spurs and putting in the screws and rods. Well the pain n my spine never went away. I got used to it and my new limitations. Time went by and nothing really seemed to help except a set of facet shots on both sides of L5. This eliminated the pain off to the side of my spine. As time went by I noticed my numbness was creeping back down my left leg and was soon followed by pain. Then numbness started down my right leg. Before surgery I had a little numbness in my right foot but that was it. Now it was much more wide spread. So Just a bit over three years past my fusion they ordered another CT scan and that was what brought me the awful news. The whole premise of my fusion was to slow down the damage. I knew better than to think it would halt it.
So here I was just 17 days out from Christmas. A happy time of the year when we spend more time with family and friends. A time when we look forward to seeing Christmas decorations and holiday movies and shows. Yet here I was in a deep funk. The news I got was that there was now damage in T12 ( the highest the CT scan went.) In fact it was herniated. So was L1, L2 and L3. In the space of 39 months my spine had gotten much worse. That wasn't all. I said I had numbness in both legs and sciatic pain especially in my left leg. The CT scan had found the cause of that as well. Seems I had bone spurs growing in the nerve canal from L3 down as well as bone spurs growing into the nerve root at L3 ( hadn't hit the nerves yet.) L4 and L5/S1. This last one was the worst where the bone spurs had grown so much that they were actually almost covering the nerve root. The scan also showed that L4 was basically destroyed and L5 had started to break down.
I had gained 3 years if that. My future had just changed drastically. I'm more than a little depressed. I am scared to have another CT scan done to see if the damage is going higher. My pain management doctor, well actually the PA who was doing the review, seemed happy since now they had a reason to try different shots. Meanwhile I had no clue how to handle the news. I wanted to scream and shout and punch something. I wanted to cry. I wanted a new back. I wonder how much longer I can continue to work. I sit at my desk for 8 or more hours a day on a chair that has 2 pillows on it to cushion my flat ass. ( My wife says I have no ass.) I have all kinds of padding in my stomach and none at all on my ass. I think this is probably helping to accelerate the damage. All that sitting puts pressure on the tailbone and that puts pressure on the rest of the spine. So there I was, my mind spinning from this and the PA was acting like t was good news. I guess from her point of view it was. It meant more money for the pain clinic.
So that news kind of killed my Christmas spirit. What else could go wrong ? But wait there was more. The pain clinic told me they couldn't do my next set of shots until I got my bill down. I had made a$600.00 payment just a month earlier and my bill should have been around $125.00 bucks. They said it was over $700.00. Trying to get this straightened out was even more of a pain. The billing office is not at the office. It is actually a 3rd party company. The way they bill is horrible. I have never even seen my $600.00 payment show up on a bill. The only payment that has shown s a 29.00 payment back in September. I went back through the claims submitted to my insurance company and I can't get my total to come even close to theirs. So I get to fight with the billing office while not getting the shots that might help kill some of my pain. I used up my FSA account trying to keep up with their bills. I am hoping that my last request to the billing office will get this issue resolved. But have not gotten what I asked for which is a simple list of all claims from July 1 until December 31st and a list of my payments. This will make it much easier than what they give, which is a running total with payments broken up to pay different procedures. Makes it really hard to see what is going on. Makes you want to scream.
So now my dreams for the future are gone. Heck my dreams are smashed. I am scared of the future. In less than a week I will hit 48 years on the planet. I am wondering just how much longer I will see the future while being able to stand. I am wondering if I will be in a wheelchair before 50. I am wondering how much longer it will be until the numbness in my legs is complete. I wonder how much pain I will be in . I wonder if there is anything I can do to stop the damage. I wonder how I will continue to support my wife and pay our bills. I wonder where the heck i will come up with 4 or 5 hundred bucks to pay to pain management to get the next set of shots. I also wonder just how much pain I can live with as my spine continues to slowly destroy itself. So many questions with no answers. t would cause anyone to have a bit of depression.