Advice on disc protrusion

[Sonj]

Hi, I guess the negativity is just worry about having a course of injections only to end up needing surgery anyway and I wonder if I'm not just best to have the surgery and get it over with. I know I won't know if they will heal this permanantly until I try but I'm just getting so sick of it all now and the thought of going thro another while of being ok after a jab only for it to reoccur again is unbearable. But yes, I should be thinking more positively. Just finding it quite hard just now cos of the pain, lack of mobility and lack of sleep.

It's been nearly a week now and there has been a little improvement. I had to stop taking the morphine as it was doing very little for the pain and just making me feel very sick (I threw up) and horrid. Out of hours GP came to my house and gave me Fentanyl patches and these have made a big difference to the pain level. I am using them with the CoDydramol for breakthrough pain and also using some Ibuprofen gel when the Codeine wears off but it's not time to take more. The gel is affecting my gut and I feel sick and raging heartburn and am using herbal Slippery Elm powder to rememdy that as I find things like Rinitidine and Lanzaprosaline(or whatever it's called!) abs useless. Feel like a walking pharmacy, lol!

So, I can now stand and shuffle/limp across the living room and I'm doing this every so often, usually before it's time to take the painkillers or it leaves me in agony for about half an hour. But atleast I'm starting to be able to walk for a tiny bit longer. Still pulling up my legs and going for crawls too! My knees were going very red and sore from the crawling so my friend and I have fashioned knee pads from sponges and pairs of tights, lol! The ortho has squeezed me in to see me on Thursday and an ambulancey thing is being arranged through my GP to get me to the hospital. I have been trying to contact the pain clinic re another injection but nobody is ever answering the damn phone and they havn't got back in touch when I left a message but it has been a Bank Holiday so hopefully they will get back in touch today.

My icky shoulder feels like it's burning up too cos of lying on my front and having to crawl. I feel a right mess just now, lol! Oh well, atleast I can still laugh at myself, you just gotta sometimes. My daughter is home now and my friend is helping me to get her meals and stuff. Her father is being a BLEEP!!! and totally unreliable! Thank goodness for good friends!

[Sonj]

UPDATE

I have been to see the Orthopaedic consultant and he was saying to me, that in cases like mine where the inflammation keeps on reoccuring and getting worse each time, then it is more than likely that this will keep on happening and just getting worse. He believes there is little point in having another injection and reckons that having surgery is the only option left to me.

I am now able to get up and walk some and have been managing to get outside for the past 3 days. My leg feels very odd, like I have to focus all my attention on being able to move my leg. It took me 20 minutes to walk what would normally take just a few minutes. But boy, it's great to be mobile again!!! I had some more acupuncture on Thursday and it has def helped and it has even taken away the pain I was getting in my shoulder. The pain is now under control with the Fentanyl patches, codeine and Ibuprofen gel and various other stuff for all the side effects!!

The surgeon said he unfortunately couldn't operate in the next few weeks as he is on leave but I'm assuming that as soon as he gets back he will want to operate ASAP. He will be doing a keyhole discectomy and I will only be in hospital overnight. He said as long as there were no complications (which he doesn't forsee) it should take 4-6 weeks for me to recover and be able to drive again and there is a 90% success rate. I asked when he could see me climbing again and he said that as soon as the 6weeks were up, I should go for it as soon as I felt fit and well enough. Seems all positive.

I also enquired about the denting to the vertebrae and it would seem that my GP has been misinforming me yet again!! He said there was no denting whatsoever and that the 'acute endplate changes' referred to the fact that the inflammation from the disc was making my vertebrae inflammed also. So this clears up the confusion I was feeling over that because I was rather baffled as to how and when I could have fractured my vertebrae. Mentioned above that I had fallen onto my backside a few weeks before my troubles started but it wasn't a bad fall and there was no pain/bruising/swelling at the time. So that's that bit cleared up anyway!

Thankyou for listening and for all the advice over the past few months. Hopefully once I've had the surgery I can move on from all this and get my life back on track