What to Do?

[Kalo]

Hi All,

I know I should be calendar counting, but....It's been 6 months since pirformis/sciatica pain started right AFTER I beat trigemenial neuralagia.

I stopped visiting the wiki cause my pain was at a 3 and I was starting to realize that I could control the pain! It dawned on me that my pain would increase on the THREE hour drive to work and then disappear while at work and just before leaving for home buttock pain and the works.

However when I got home, the pain would diminish quite a bit!

Well, just recently the pain has come back and it travels. Sometimes it was hurting in just my buttock and hip area. Then my buttock and all the way down my calf. I would get spasms and burn. But the most recent was I started feeling a tad bit weakness on the front of my right foot.

Their was an incident where a friend of the family told me that every time she calls she is going to beat the negativity out of me. She doesn't understand the struggles I am going through with no family member support and having to take care of my poor mom who suffers dementia.

I got extremely angry at her and couldn't look go of that anger, plus my brother who doesn't even care about his mother had me angry as well. I was starting to analize and ruminating and last week the pain cameback full tilte.

What I am wondering is...Am, I being foolish for not getting a back X-ray or MRI? I would like to avoid it, but, I don't know what to do?

I have been seen by two Doctors who are DO's and they both told me I have SI Joint dysfunction and that this nothing but pirformis.

One of them tried to give me predisone, but, I declined....

Your support and help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Kalo

 

[Walt Oleksy (RIP 2021)]

Hi, Kalo. My experience with doctors is that they love to prescribe medication or surgery. I avoid both. If I were you I would give TMS a good try before taking any medication or having tests. They may show some structural problem but that may not cause pain. Pain is probably from repressed emotions.

You are dealing with a lot by being your mother's caretaker. I was my mother's, and know how stressful that can be. She, like many if not most seniors, could not be pleased no matter how I knocked myself out to do that. My older brother was like yours, he pushed caring for Mom onto my sister and then after Mom wore her out, I got the job. I lasted two years and then we had to make other arrangements. She eventually went into a nursing home.

Try to be patient with your mother, but when it gets too hard to bear, go somewhere and scream or cry. Or both. Then treat yourself to something that give you pleasure. Your Mom has dementia so she can't help causing you stress and anger. Maybe hold her hands, rub them, give her a kiss. She will feel your love and it could help you both.

The fact that your pain moves around is a good sign that your subconscious mind knows you are onto it and discovering the emotions causing your pain.

I found the following today on CNN and will share it, about the dangers of medication.


Bob Beckel is a CNN political commentator. His memoir, "I Should Be Dead," will be published Tuesday. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN)In my youth, it took me many years of heavy drinking to become a career alcoholic. This year, it took less than eight weeks of medical treatment to become addicted to OxyContin and Percocet.

It started in the spring when long-standing pain in my back, dating to my high school football days, led me to go in for a complex -- and, as it turned out, somewhat risky --surgical procedure. The operation, called a lumbar fusion, took nearly 10 hours; the attending team of doctors were amazing; it was successful. For the first time in a long time, my back was pain-free.

There were, however, complications. Many of those who undergo this surgery suffer a temporary motor neuropathy -- diminished use of one or both legs due to nerve damage -- a setback from which they generally recover quickly. A much smaller percentage take a hit in one or both legs for a longer period of time, sometimes indefinitely.

As it turned out, I fell into that latter category. Recovering even partial use of my left leg would require a strict routine of extensive physical therapy and rehabilitation for at least a year, the doctors told me, maybe more, combined with severe limitations on travel and mobility. And while the long-standing back pain was gone, now there was the excruciating pain of post-op recovery.

As bad as the back pain had been, the agony following surgery was worse. My doctors prescribed OxyContin and Percocet, which were amazingly effective. Unfortunately, they also proved horribly addictive -- which I knew posed a risk in some ways greater than the surgery.

I am an addict, and have been my whole life. At the time of my surgery, I was 14 years clean and sober -- but addiction isn't something that goes away just because it's dormant. (There's a reason recovering alcoholics live by the dictum "one day at a time.") While the surgery had been a success, now my sobriety and, in a very real sense, my life were on the line. I elected to check in to the Hazelden Betty Ford Center Pain Management Program to help me get off the meds and to treat my pain.

At Betty Ford I discovered that, ironically, I was one of the fortunate few. My long history of addiction notwithstanding, the pills did not get their hooks into me all that deeply. Back in the halcyon (read: perpetually stoned) days of the '60s and '70s, I'd been exposed to drugs that functioned much the same as OxyContin and Percocet, but my drugs of choice were alcohol and later cocaine. Now, in 2015, I had little difficulty prying myself completely off the meds as my post-op recovery progressed. I never felt that irresistible gravitational pull that had nearly killed me many times over at the height of my destructive affair with alcohol and cocaine.

I was lucky. Many others I saw at Betty Ford were not. It was appalling to witness. One after another, I encountered a steady procession of fine, otherwise healthy people coming through the center who, unlike me, had never in their lives been addicts or alcoholics, good people who had done nothing but follow their doctors' orders and taken the meds they were prescribed to take—and as a result had now plunged off the cliff into addiction.

There are millions like them. The problem of prescription-induced addiction, I've come to learn, is at epidemic levels in the United States. In June a Time magazine cover storycalled it"the worst addiction crisis America has ever seen." Two months later, to my utter amazement, the Food and Drug Administrationapproved the use of OxyContin for children 11 and older.

Ostensibly, the doctors prescribing these drugs are well-intentioned; they don't mean to create addicts. They simply don't have the education to know better. During their four years of medical school, doctors receive no more than an average ofeight hours' training in addiction, according to a surveyin theJournal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. The bitter irony here is that not only are these meds fiercely addictive, they also aren't an especially effective solution to the problem they're used to treat. Dr. Peter Przekop, director of pain management at the BettyFordCenter and one of the nation's leading authorities on pain management, says, "There is overwhelming evidence that opioids are not effective for the treatment of chronic non-cancer pain. Indeed, they have created a wealth of unwanted problems and suffering."

According to Przekop, research over the last two decades says chronic pain is a disease of the brain, and that adequate treatment that addresses the brain and mind, as opposed to simply attempting to dull the pain signal, can be accomplished with non-pharmacologic methods. "The time is long overdue," he says, "to create novel research-based treatment options." We need to do everything we can to support research into more effective approaches to chronic pain.

Meanwhile, we as a nation need to do a much better job of regulating these substances -- and our medical schools need to get serious about teaching our physicians the true, often life-shattering impact that opioids are having in people's lives. Millions of American are addicted to these opioids.More than 16,000 died from overdose in 2013-- that's 44 a day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's a national tragedy -- one we can and must change.

 

[Kalo]

Walt you are my ANGEL!!!!! You always know what to say to make me and other feel better. This hole forum and the people also are my angels too!

The below article just blew me away!!! You know I am not embrassed to say this, but, I was given klonopin by a doctor about 9 months ago. I found it takes 4 weeks to get hooked....

I found this out after I got hooked for nine months! OMG, get off this drug is tuff and it does effect the nervous system. Yesterday I was having such a bad day...I cut down the pill to a quarter....

Guess what I took a hole pill and it helped my pain...Like it was almost gone!

This tells me that it can't be structural.

However, KLONOPIN is the worth drug anyone can take...

Kalo