Yesterday, I had 2 appointments in Seattle to see my orthopedists about my foot and my knee. We left early Monday morning, leaving behind 2 unhappy girls who wanted to get out of school and join us on our trip. I just survived a weekend of 2 birthday/slumber parties; we are broke and exhausted. We have taken them with us in the past, the girls, especially my youngest is very helpful when we go. She holds my hand and tries to comfort me while I get injections in my knees and feet. My husband is wonderful and supportive, but he hates hospitals. He hates doctors. He does love me though and will take me to Seattle, just for a change of scenery. My doctors are at Virginia Mason Hospital. I have been to the UW Hospital and the Swedish Hospital in Seattle, but I prefer Virginia Mason (sorry UW - my favorite University- we are HUGE Husky fans and bleed purple blood in my family). They had a huge banner when I walked into the pavilion that read "Top 5% in the nation, for healthcare." TRUE! Every specialist I have seen, has been up, on the latest treatments, and they all work together, to find you the best treatment for your ailments. Their only downfall, is that they are in Seattle, 2 1/2 hours away AND you have to pay to park! I think that is the most ridiculous thing ever, pay to go and park to see a doctor! Come on! Things are so expensive already, can't they recoup that cost somewhere else? When we went yesterday, the doctor was behind schedule, we were there from 11:15 to 2:00. I absolutely love the staff, they know me so well since I've been going there so long, they did give us an all day pass for free parking! That helps, even a little. I saw my doctor for about 15 minutes. He felt my foot and said, let's put you in a walking cast, I'll see you in 4 weeks. I talked to him, briefly about the entrapped nerves in my left foot. I want him to remove the entrapped nerves, but he does not really want to. It's a tedious surgery that requires him to open my foot, find the entrapped nerves, follow the nerves to point where they are not so aggravated and sever them. Then he takes the severed nerve, drills a hole in my bone and stuffs the nerve in the bone, so it won't regrow together. Sounds like fun huh? He is very skeptical about doing this, mostly because it may not fix my problem - pain. The entrapped nerves are from a cyst I had several years ago...
In 2003 I started getting problems with my feet. It started with Plantar's Faciatis. This causes the tendon on the bottom of your foot to shrink. When you go to walk, it is excruciatingly painful. Every step causes extreme pain in your heel as you walk. I had shots in my heel, and spent lots of time soaking my feet in ice water to numb the pain. I took a trip to Disneyworld at this time and it was very memorable, especially since the pain was seared into me during the trip. The more you walk, the better this condition gets, but whenever you quit walking, the first few steps are just excruciating! You can imagine my trip, long lines, humidity and torrential rain. We would start to walk and just as the pain started to subside we would have to stop, and wait in line, or RUN to get out of the rain. I new there were hurricanes in Florida, I knew it was hot in Floriday, but I didn't know how humid it was, or that they had torrential rainstorms that last 40 days and nights according to the concierge in our hotel. Anyway, that was spring 2003. In the Fall of 2004, I got this cyst on the left side of my left foot, just a little below my ankle. My local podiatrist injected it with cortisone, trying to shrink it. A week after he injected it, it hurt like crazy. So I went back, hardly able to walk, let alone put a shoe on, and he decided to remove it. So I had a surgery to remove the cyst. Unfortunately, a month after the surgery, the cyst came back! It was so painful, I had to go back to the podiatrist. So we had another surgery to remove it AGAIN, and at that surgery he also fixed the bunion on my left foot, or rather removed the bunion and broke my left foot, but that's another story. So I had this cyst injected and removed twice, and then scar tissue built up in that site, entrapping the nerves. The slightest touch to that site causes a searing pain that shoots up my foot. It is uncomfortable to wear socks and unbearable to wear shoes. So I wear slippers, which is not the best footwear, especially in the snow and rain. You can see why I want this problem to go away, it interferes with my walking, and my quality of life, as I try to raise 5 kids!
Anyway, tomorrow I have an appointment with my pain specialist in Yakima (finally, someone in Yakima who knows what they are doing). The pain specialist has been waiting for me to get off of my pain meds so that he can do a spinal chord stimulator trial, to see if this would stop the pain from the entrapped nerves. Personally, I would rather have my foot operated on, than my spine, but my orthopedist in Seattle thinks that the stimulator is a better bet for pain management, because he does not think that the nerve removal will be successful. I would rather try on my foot and if that fails, then work on pain management via the spine. Tomorrow I'll find out, what my pain specialist thinks. The final WORD, lies with him, if he thinks we should try to fix the nerves first we will do that surgery, otherwise I'll see my VA doc back in 4 weeks.
Two o'clock and one more appointment in Issaquah at 3:00. We had enough time to sit down and share a bite to eat before I went to the other orthopedist about my knee. So I was put into a walking cast and given permission to walk (which I had already been doing out of necessity). Off to Issaquah we went...
Ok, here's a little background on my knees. Growing up I was a swimmer, gymnast and cheerleader. In high school, I started having problems with my knees. I had arthoscopic surgeries to see what was wrong and a lateral realease on my left knee ( (they cut the muscle on the side of my knee, to release my kneecap which was being pulled out of place by the muscle). So I have had problems in the past. Several years ago my knees started to hurt and grind. Every step I took caused this scritching sound, totally audible to everyone. I went to a local doctor and he told me that my body wasn't producing the fluid to help my bones slide easily over one another as I walked. Without this fluid, the kneecap just grinds over my knee. He gave me a full leg brace on the left, thinking that if I did not use my knee, it might regenerate itself naturally. Then he advised me to NEVER use stairs for the rest of my life (RIGHT, we had just bought our first two-story house and all of my scrapbooking stuff was downstairs)! I thought he was crazy, he said there was nothing else he could do for me, so I went to Virginia Mason for another opinion. The doctor at VA took an MRI and agreed that I had arthritis in my knees and no longer produced the fluid which caused the grinding in my knees. He said that I would need knee replacements, but I was too young, so we needed to try something else to get me by. First he tried cortisone shots, then synvisc injections. The last synvisc injections caused an allergic reaction and both my knees swelled up so big that I couldn't walk. My knees had to be drained, and now I don't have very many options except knee replacement which he does not want to do because it won't last forever and will need to be done more than once before I die. So, I've been nursing my knees along, wearing braces to help decrease the strain of the grind, but now I have another problem...
Last week, my kneecap on my right leg started popping out of place. Sound like fun? Not really, if my knee bends more than 45 degrees, it catches and pops out, and HURTS! I started wearing my brace to try and hold it in place, but it still hurts, constantly. So I have this cast on my left foot and my right knee keeps popping out of place, the fibromyalgia is excruciating in my right hip and now I'm starting to get pain in the middle of my low back again (I should NOT have any pain in my low back since I had a rhizotomy on both sides a few months ago - this is a NOT so fun procedure in which they burn the nerves off in one area, to alleviate the pain. No nerves, no pain, right? You're nerves eventually grow back, but it should take a year). So my knee is killing me and I can't wait to see what he says, but I have an idea - my prediction is arthroscopic surgery to see what is popping out and repair something to hold it in place.
As I limp into the office and start sweating from the pain, the nurse says, "Oh, my. Just look at you, don't you have a cane?" Me? A cane? I'm not even 40! I don't have a cane! So she brings me in a cane. That thrills me, as you can imagine!
The doctor comes in, and of course when he checks my knee it doesn't pop! I was shocked, I knew it popped, I felt it, I heard it, but of course it would not do it when the doctor was around! He watched me limp around the room. Then he told me that maybe I should be in a wheelchair for a while. He thinks that I have torn the cartilidge in my knee. The fix - surgery, which he doesn't really want to do since I can't use my other leg very well, but he will if I'm in too much pain. He gave me a cortisone shot, a new, more supportive knee brace and sent me off. I'm supposed to call him on Friday and if things haven't improved, he will do an MRI and then decide what to do next. So I limp out of his office, pain shooting down my right arm, from my elbow to the middle of my hand (fibromyalgia I think), so my arm is shaking as I hold the cane and I'm sweating even more from the pain of the shot. I look like I'm 80 years old all hunched over and limping along. My husband said I looked way worse than when I went in. Finally, time to rest and contemplate this new situation. It's a two and a half hour drive home, and I cry for two hours from pain and frustration...tomorrow I see the pain specialist, I'm hoping for a better outcome.
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