Date: Wednesday February 8, 2017 Location: The Neurology Clinic – Waldorf, MD
A month running around chasing various medical tests is hectic. If that is hectic, I guess enduring it while writhing in pain, barely sleeping, moving from our row home to my in-law’s, and somehow having a kickass month of sales, I guess we could call it organized chaos. Ok I’m being too kind to myself. It was simply chaos.
In case you missed it in previous posts, my wife and I vacated our rental row home in D.C. and we were starting to settle into my in-laws’ home just outside the city in Potomac. We thought perhaps the age of the row home (over 100 years) might’ve been playing a role in my poor health, as it was our first winter in the home. Our landlord was kind and my wife’s folks have been kinder.
When I look back and think about how I managed to crush my January sales goal through all of this, I think it was because I tried to do whatever I could to keep my mind off of the excruciating pain and the enormous swelling. Fact is, I could barely sit or stand without pain. Most days at work included time fighting back tears at my desk or excusing myself to let them out in the bathroom while I frantically tried anything I could to shed the pain or reduce swelling for 20-30 minutes at a time. Colleagues no doubt saw how much of a mess I was.
Test results to this point had been inconclusive. My MRI of the brain and neck showed everything was mostly normal. I have an arachnoid cyst (a benign water cyst) and slight bit of spinal stenosis – two things consistent with previous MRIs. Interestingly enough, the MRI did not show a pinched nerve though the EMG test did show a nerve was pinched in my neck. My carotid Doppler test was clean and perfect. My small range of blood work was normal.
The first 36 days were certainly busy.
So get to it long-winded, Jason. You’ve made me read this much when I already saw the header. What is the damn “I’m terribly sorry look” already? I can hear my wife and my mom saying that while reading this so I figured I’d add the comment.
The “I’m Terribly Sorry” look – what is that? The look I actually got from a VERY CONCERNED Dr Sethi, and God bless him, was more like, “$#!%, I don’t want to hand you this.” Anyone ever had that happen? February 8, 2017 was my turn.
By the way, this is not a critique of Dr. Sethi’s bedside manner. In fact, it’s the opposite as I’m about to praise him.
Dr. Sethi was the first doctor to give me a CRPS diagnosis. He handed me a prescription to begin physical therapy and then he began explaining the difficult CRPS diagnosis plus his experience treating it. Dr. Sethi told me it was going to be rough, not so much how rough or maybe how long. I guess that might be due to his admission of limited experience with CRPS. He told me I might also want to get another opinion from someone more familiar with treating CRPS. Personally, I think that takes a lot of compassion for a doctor to be willing to encourage patients to seek additional opinions from peers in the community. How many of us do that in our own professional careers? He also ordered a bone scan to be performed the following week to help further analyze this thing ****this was great wisdom and will be CLUTCH later on**** Dr. Sethi’s care then and throughout these many months has been fantastic.
While in the car on the way back to Potomac, I began searching for a physical therapist familiar with CRPS, booked an appointment with a hand specialist/surgeon, and also sought to circle back to my primary care doctor, Dr. Alan Morrison. After calling a half dozen physical therapy practices in D.C. near my office, I kept getting the same version of this answer from them, “Sir, we’ve never heard of CRPS, you’ll have to get another diagnosis and call back.” It’s doubly frustrating when you consider I searched these practices based on their approval by my healthcare provider and proximity to work alone. I literally wanted the least disruption to life as possible. I was frustrated. I gave up that effort and booked the appointment with Dr. Morrison before Crissy dropped me off at work.
I remember trying to focus at work and it being a fleeting exercise. How could I concentrate? I mean with the level of pain, the anxiety of the diagnosis, and the frustration over failing to find a single therapy practice near my office – in the center of our nation’s capital – it’s a friggin’ miracle I bootstrapped my way into work on that winter day. Now throw in the dejection that I was supposed to be leaving the next day to take my bride on our first Valentines trip as a married couple and I couldn’t fly due to my health. That’s right, a vacation cancelled. This was actually my Christmas gift to my wife. The plan was to fly south to spend time with both sets of her parents in South Florida (Delray Beach and South Beach respectively). One might say pretty ruined two holidays. Great. I guess it worked out that I bought the trip insurance I usually never buy because I purchased the flights as a surprise gift and I didn’t know if something might cause either her family not to be there or us to not go. It didn’t matter. I was still mentally beating myself up. That didn’t help matters at all. Retrospectively, self-pity only exacerbates CRPS symptoms so I was certainly my own worst enemy that day.
When I previously mentioned fighting back tears at my desk or hiding in the bathroom to let them out, it was for a reason. I finally lost it when I felt what seemed like lasers of raging fire shooting up my arm beginning at my fingers and running through my wrist into my shoulder. I’ll never forget how hot and how gigantic my hand grew. It looked like my left hand turned into a purple oven mitt. I should’ve taken a picture. It was much like the night we saw Louis C.K., but even worse. I was trying not to let out screams. I was writhing in pain.
The co-workers I sat near had to have noticed. They said nothing. God only knows what they were wondering. If you’re reading this blog, maybe now you’ll understand I wasn’t crazy or a wimp. Not that matters what they thought. All I needed was the pain to stop. I began feeling chest pain and around 4:45pm I left the office in a Lyft car and was heading to Sibley Memorial Hospital (a hospital in the world renown Johns Hopkins Medicine network) because it is a hospital Dr. Morrison has a great relationship with. Crissy met me at Sibley looking concerned and exhausted. After a thorough evaluation that included a chest x-ray and an EKG, they sent me on my way. The ER doc wasn’t familiar with CRPS and since she knows Dr. Morrison well, she told me to seek him the next day. It only added to the confusion as to what was going on with me.
At the end of the day, I was exhausted – mentally, physically, and emotionally. I didn’t have anything left. Move forward to the next day in a quest to find a way to stop the pain and get well.
Beat CRPS.
Jason