Shit just got real

Back in 1985 or 1986, I blew out a cervical disc and although I can’t remember the date, I remember the day clearly.  I was a secretary then, working in the City of Austin Purchasing Office. My usual style for working was to sit with my computer keyboard in my lap, head cocked and shoulder hunched to hold the phone receiver as I took dictation, typing straight onto the computer.  (headsets?  The City don’t need no steenkin’ headsets!)

I was doing just that, on the phone with someone, when I both heard and felt a “pop” inside my head, and I got dizzy for a moment.  I finished my call and told my office-mate what had happened, and she was alarmed enough to get the head of the department, whose office was across the hall from us, and HE was alarmed enough to call EMS, who came and looked me over.  I wasn’t sure what had happened, but I knew that nothing hurt and the dizziness had gone away, so I declined their offer to take me to Brackenridge Hospital.

A few years after that, I began to have back pain, usually at the trigger point below my left shoulder blade.  It bothered me enough that about 1994 I went to my doctor, who sent me to a neurologist, who examined me and ordered an MRI, and discovered that I had a left-posterior herniation of my C5/6 disc.  On the film, I could see that the disc was bulging inward on the back left corner, invading the spinal fluid and the exit where the sixth cervical spinal nerve ran down into my left arm.  The disc bulge pressing on the nerve was what caused my pain.  However, the neurologist didn’t think the herniation was anywhere near bad enough to make the risks associated with spinal surgery worth it. He prescribed physical therapy, which I did for a while and then stopped when my medical benefits ran out.  I still had pain sometimes, but it wasn’t so bad.

In 2010, the bad disc flared up again and I went to a new neurologist, since the old one had either retired or disappeared.  She examined me, ordered an MRI, and when those films came back she told me that it did appear the herniation was getting worse but the risk of surgery still wasn’t worth it.  She prescribed more PT, which I did until my benefits ran out again.

In mid-November, I changed jobs at the Empire and moved into a group called the Global Command Center, where I monitor dispatches for computer server service calls to make sure they happen regardless.  Agents in the GCC don’t sit in normal cubes.  We sit at desks, with a rack holding three monitors in front of us (yeah, to do my job I need three computer screens at once).  This is an arrangement of screens I’ve never had to deal with before at the Empire; everywhere else, I always looked DOWN into a screen, not up.  And that’s the problem.  Sitting with my head back and tilted up so I could look at the screens on their rack, I started putting a lot of pressure on the bad disc, and the disc put a lot of pressure on the nerve.

And the nerve hurt.  It hurt a LOT.  It hurt all day, every day.  I got continual stabbing pains under my left shoulder, shooting pain running all down my left arm with three or four foci, I started getting pain in my left thigh, and my left thumb and forefinger began having several episodes a day of pins-and-needles and numbness.  I’d get involuntary tremors and jerks in my left hand and arm to where I couldn’t type with that hand, and I would sometimes drop things I thought I had hold of.  You know how doctors always ask you to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, to give them an idea?  Well, I’d usually start the workday at about a two.  If I had a good day, by quitting time I’d be at a six.  On a bad day (and there have been a lot of bad days), I’d be at an eight and trying not to cry because of how much it hurt.

This got me scared.  I’m left handed, and very left-side dominant.  I couldn’t deal with the idea of effectively losing my writing arm, my working arm, my everything-in-the-world-I-do arm.  I couldn’t really concentrate on my job training, because with that much pain it’s very hard to think about anything except how much you hurt.  So I made an appointment to go back to the neurologist I’d seen in 2010.

I saw her on Thursday.  She examined me, and when she got done her professional opinion was “oh my god, the muscle spasms!”  The official diagnosis, the one she wrote for the insurance company, was “degeneration of cervical intervertebral disc, spinal stenosis in cervical region, neuralgia and radiculitis, and possible lumbosacral disc degeneration.”  The last one is because she isn’t convinced that my thigh pain is being caused by the cervical problems, and wants to look further into it.  I walked out with prescriptions for Flexeril (muscle relaxant), Ultram ER (low-powered opiate painkiller meant for long-term use), Voltaren (high-powered non-steroidal anti-inflammatory), and Medrol (steroid), hoping to knock down some of the pain and inflammation.  I also got a referral to an acupuncturist, again to work on the pain, orders for MRIs, and a summary of “once we have the films, I’ll refer you to a neurosurgeon.” Which was not unexpected; I’ve gotten bad enough that a vertebral fusion is the only path forward I can see.  The neurologist said outright “we’re not going to waste time trying PT; you’re in too much pain for that.”  (Ain’t THAT the truth!)

Today, the first day on all the new drugs, was a good day. I had a lot less pain, although I’m still getting pins-and-needles and numbness in my arm and fingers when I lie on my left side.  If the drugs can keep the pain at bay while I’m going through the rest of diagnosis, and let me function until surgery can happen, I just might work through this.