Week 17/18

I'm combining two weeks progress here. April 15 marked my four month anniversary of my surgery; April 14 marked the two-month mark of getting the IVC filter removed. How am I doing? Right now - horrible. Today has been my best day in a few weeks, but that is not saying much.

The pain is different from before the surgery, but I can now officially say that physical therapy has made things drastically worse, not better. That was confirmed last Thursday when I went in for my appointment and found I had no reflex in in my right foot, and couldn't stand on my right leg, toes, or heal. After an assessment by the owner and the individual I was working with that day, they came to the conclusion that everything they have had me doing has been wrong. It appears that the stretches and exercises have put pressure on my nerve canal, so I'm now experiencing horrible, crippling nerve pain. That was actually somewhat good news...they could tell by certain movements that the pain was nerve-related and not something else. The bad news is that I've hardly been able to walk or move now for the last few weeks, and the pain has made life pretty miserable.

My surgeon wants me to stick with physical therapy, as I only have three more visits left. The thought is that if they keep working with me to get things back to normal that hopefully I'll get some relief soon. I will say that this morning I could actually walk semi-normally instead of my normal shuffle/struggle to move one foot a centimeter at a time. For the time being I'm not doing any stretches or exercise machine work; everything revolves around movements to take pressure off the nerve canal and electro-acupuncture. I was basically told that in my current position, even standing or walking would just aggravate things, which it does.

I do have an appointment with my primary care doc this Friday, so I'm sure she'll do some blood work and who knows what else. I will stress that my pain does feel different than before...I'm just back to being as miserable, at least these past few weeks. If I'm behind on correspondence, it's because I'm once again pretty much sticking to work and then trying to rest and calm down the pain when I'm home. I find it very hard to write when I feel so miserable; all I want to do is to try and shut my brain down and preferably sleep so I don't have to be awake for the torture. Though it takes me a long time to get to sleep, once I do I'm at least able to sleep through the night. Thank goodness for little positive things.

I'll write more next week, as I'm sure I'll have some blood test results and such to share. I'm a bit nervous, since it will be interesting to see where my numbers are - especially my ANA and platelet count.