A year has passed since my last update. My world has changed significantly. I met an amazing woman from my home town that does not judge me and my situation. We are engaged to get married in August. She has had a taste of my terrible luck with medical and is still with me. When we were moving into our apartment, my back went out. I tried to push through but the following Tuesday, I couldn't keep going so I went to see a chiropractor who immediately sent me to the ER. I was hesitant because the hospital that used to be so wonderful is now part of Spectrum Health - a massive group of hospitals and medical care. They took one look at my chart and immediately assumed I was a junkie. Gave me a shot of Tordal and sent me on my way. God forbid they have compassion and make you comfortable so you can try to manage the pain going forward. Anyway, I had an appointment with my pain doctor the following day to get my monthly lumbar sympathetic injections to help manage my CRPS. He uses fluoroscopy to guide the needles into my spinal area to inject the medication. Later that day, I was at my apartment moving something and I started getting a horrible pain on the left side middle of my back. Excruciating. I was almost to tears when my fiance took me to the same hospital as the day before (as much as I hate the place, I figured it was best to be consistent). The pain was so bad tears were running down my face. My blood pressure was through the roof. None of that mattered to the doctor and they refused to give me meds. I laid there for 7 hours until someone remembered me. The doc then checked the results of my CT scan, came to my room and says "wow, I was wrong, you have a massive hematoma in your back. They admit me, I wait in the room for over an hour for the doctor to come up and she will only give me a baby dose of dilaudid. With my tolerance to medications, this is like fighting a fire with a squirt gun. I suffered for 5 days in agony before it finally started to settle down and I could go home. I will never go to Spectrum Health Blodgett or Butterworth hospitals again.
In January of this year, I had the clawed toes on my right foot fixed. Unfortunately, it is now at the point where hospitals are too scared to provide the amount of pain medication I need. My tolerance to ketamine is too high and they will not provide more than 2 mg of dilaudid. I had another 5 days of burning misery in the hospital followed by 2 days of withdrawals from the ketamine afterwards. My toes got infected and the antibiotic helped but didn't completely kill off the infection. The wounds smelled and took over a month to heal. It was quite a journey.
It's March and I am hoping to start taking less pain medicine if I can. Go down 1/2 a pill every week or two. I don't know if I'll be able to do it but I need to try. I want to get back to having normal feelings/emotions. My fiance deserves me being 100%.
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