Hey Everyone, I am new here. In 1995 I had a patient (i was a CNA) fall out of the hoyer lift and crushed me into the concrete floor, she was about 300lbs! I had herniated L5-S1. I had my first posterior fusion in Jan 1996, by May of 1996 the transverse connector rod became dislogded and was floating around impinging on my nerves to my legs. That June they went in and took out all the hardware. All this hammering and screwing caused more damage to the surrounding discs and caused my spine to slip forward called spondyloletsis, it also caused degenerative disc disease. Dying in pain for more that 7 years, I finally agreed to another surgery as the slipage was going to cause paralysis. In April 2007 I had a anterior and posterior fusion from L1 thru S1. I have a 14 inch scar on my stomach and 16 or so inches on my back. I'm am sad to say that this did nothing to help with pain nor with improving my quality of life. Everyday my legs alternate depending on how I am sitting, one is freezing cold and numb, then I move and it goes to the other leg. I also have absolutely no feeling from just above my incisions to about the back of my knees. all the way around front to back, you can pinch me as hard as you can and I don't feel nothing but tingling. I have not been able to sleep in a bed since the surgery because you can feel the rods when you lay down. So I have been sleeping in a recliner since. I was told by the surgeron that I had a 90% chance of having all my pain relieved. HAH BS I am worse off now that I have been since this started 16 years ago. I was 27 when this happened. I also have had 4 bladder surgeries since the last fusion as there is some sort of nerve damage to my bladder and they have yet to figure out how to fix it. I have been seeing the same pcp since I was 16, I will be 44 in a few weeks. All of a sudden 2 months ago he decided that I needed to decrease my meds because of some stupid study that insists that chronic pain patients should ALL be under less than 100mg of any type of pain meds per day. about 6 months ago I was not being managed well in the pain area. I was on a fentanyl patch 72mcg every 3 days. I had to have my ovaries removed because the looked cancerous which shoved me into instant menopause, they refused to give me hormone therapy because of my bp which has been well controled with meds. SO the dumb patches would not stick to my skin. We finally found a good combination that works. 60 mg of MS Contin twice a day and 15mg of oxycondone 3x a day. I was actually feeling better. Til he found this study. http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/171/16/1426 of course they won't let you read the whole thing. But is is basically we are all druggies and we are overdosing at an alarming rate and our depression is out of control. Yet the study only looked at 1000 people, not all where cp patients, some where surgical and others where drug addicts. Right now I really don't care what the study says, All I care about is what works for me and my quality of life. So I am going to look at a PM as I haven't had one in about 6 years because nothing they did helped and I felt like a pin cushion. I am interested in this medicinal pump that I have been reading about. Thanks for listening :) Happy Thanksgiving to all
Cheryl