The Countdown

 

Some of my pain 'meds' sitting beside The Golden Thread and the Jack Lenor Larson biography.  Hopefully I'll begin feeling well enough to read more than just posts on Facebook.

I have been battling peripheral neuropathy for years, on top of the damage to my back.  For over a year I had been trying various nerve blockers as nothing 'usual' was dealing with the level of pain I had been living with.  

The back damage shoots nerve pain down my right leg and into my right foot; the PN causes nerve pain of a different sort, in both feet.  I have been getting injections every 4 months or so for the sciatic pain, but nothing much was helping the PN.

Various people gave suggestions.  The first pain doctor I saw suggested lidocaine cream.  That white and red tube is 30 grams and costs about $50.  But lidocaine is short acting.  It helps in the moment, but not long enough to sleep through the night.  And it gets expensive.

From there I learned about alpha lipoic and tried that.  It takes about an hour to kick in (if it will) and then if it helps, I can usually get back to sleep for a few hours.  

The nerve blockers were helping but at the cost of adverse effects - muscle pain in my thighs to the point I could barely walk.  Finally I was convinced to try ketamine.  Before I went that far, though, I started red light laser therapy after the recommendation from my local pain doctor.

All of those non-drug (so to speak) treatments worked for a while, but the past few months things were getting 'worse'.

Once I had stopped the nerve blockers my massage therapist suggested magnesium chloride (I think) in gel form.  That seemed to reduce the nerve damage (if that is what had happened on that nearly 1.5 years of trying various nerve blockers).  But the slight improvement in my thighs was being wiped out by the increasing PN in my feet, which seemed to be crawling up my calves.

I read.  I read as much as I could find.  But PN is one of those 'weird' conditions which is tough to nail down, and a huge number of patients are 'idiopathic' - or, cause unknown.

I had a list of risk factors, some maybe nothing, some definitely something.  As a child I had planters warts on the soles of both feet.  Another kid in my class had his 'burned' off with chemicals and wound up barely able to walk until the burned tissue healed.  My family doctor suggested having mine burned off with x-rays.  Risk factor?  No one knows.  But I had massive amounts of x-rays aimed at my feet for about 20 minutes a treatment.  Which continued for weeks and ate up that summer.

I also danced ballet.  Including toe shoes.  I experienced blisters, bruises under my toe-nails, pain in my feet.  Risk factor?  No one really knows.

My body has multiple allergies and lack of some vitamins seem to encourage PN.  Since so many different foods are allergens, I have experienced deficiencies in both vitamins and micro-minerals several times in my life.  All I know was that for a time in my 40s I had horrible pain in my feet, plus my shoe size grew from the swelling such that I had to buy new shoes.  Interestingly when I started a new one-a-day vitamin, about 3 weeks after, the pain in my feet disappeared.  Plus I have had 3 shingles outbreaks.  The virus continues to hide in the body, living on the the nerve endings (I think.)  Is that a factor in all the nerve pain I'm having?  No idea.

Then in 2011 I was diagnosed with cancer, requiring chemotherapy.  One of the ingredients was Vincristine - a *known* cause of PN.  Sure enough I developed a 'weird' sensation in my feet and then in my hands.  I was assured when treatment stopped that should disappear.  And it did.  Until a few years ago.

Reading as much as I could about PN, it is one of those 'it depends' kind of thing.  So I read, and read, searching for answers, finding very little.

More common in diabetics, but a huge number of cases have no 'cause'.  The person just...learns, as best as they can...to live with it.

But constant pain with little to treat or manage it, is horrible, whatever the cause.  With so little actually known about the condition, and such a complexity of issues, the market is rife for 'miracle' cures.

A friend sent me a link to one.  The ones I had seen previously were based on a couple of 'spices'.  Given my track record with 'spices', I was not going to go there.  (Some spices make me seriously ill, no matter how medically helpful they can be for others.)  But this one was different.

So I ordered some and today the shipment arrived.  I have tried a dab of the cream on one foot and there appeared to be some lessening of the pain in that foot.  Nor do they claim it is a 'miracle' drug - if you read the small print, they say to use 3 times a day, or more if needed, for at least two weeks to see if it is going to be beneficial.

I'm not going to call it on the basis of one cautious dab, but I'm willing to give it a go.

In the photo the 'new' cream is the little 'pot'.  It's 4 ounces and the pot was filled right up to the brim.  And it was on sale for the same price as the lidocaine cream.  It's not made in Canada, but comes from the Netherlands.

Oh, and that tiny little vial sitting on top of the new 'pot'?  That's my crop of hope.  I'm sitting it on top of the pot in hopes that some of my hope will sink into the pot and encourage some relief.

When doing web searches, remember to ignore the AI 'recommendations'.  Look for actual medical websites and keep looking.  The last one I tried didn't *look* obviously 'medical' but when I opened the site, I found the most information I'd found to date.  

I'm now on light duty tasks for a few days, until I get the next ketamine infusion.  I'm hoping to get this warp off the loom and the next one beamed so that when I can begin weaving after the infusion it will be ready.  Or at least beamed.  Because I found 8 spools of the singles 6 and now I am back to 3 large cones of that yarn when I thought I was about to start on one of those cones.  

Oh well.  Onwards.