Discorama

Ha ha. Not quite.

The lateness of this particular post is due to the fact that, yes, it would appear my discogram revealed I’ve got something wrong with my discs.

Of course, I have to wait until the doctors give us the report, but if I had to guess, it’s a pretty safe bet there’s a few tears involved. I tried looking at the image cd, but…yeah. I can tell you which disc is the winner, but I can’t actually read the thing.

Go figure.

Anyway, although discograms on normal discs aren’t particularly painful (aside from the fact that they’re sticking a needle INTO your discs and injecting them full of fluid), when they hit discs that are torn, it definitely causes a nice inflammatory response.

Hence me currently being on my third painkiller of the day.

I also haven’t written anything today, though perhaps I should. Who knows what sort of wonderments I might come up with.  (Although, frankly, I told myself I would give myself a pass and have a guilt free gaming day as a reward for putting up with this.)

Obviously that’s not me in the picture, but I like how it shows the scale of how freaking big those needles are.

Also, what was cool was that the first disc they did really didn’t give me any pain, so I had a good comparison for the next three that did – the last one at L3-L4 was the jackpot, so there’s got to be something going on there. And if so, would explain why all the joint injections and muscle treatments haven’t been working – they haven’t touched the source of the issue.

So, good to know we were able to pinpoint this to *something* – there’s nothing worse than just some nebulous pain cloud that doesn’t appear to have any origin. The hard part will probably come next – there’s a good chance this means I’ll be having to get a fusion – though I will get a few opinions on that. My pain doc will most likely want to try prolotherapy on the discs first and as painful as that will be, it will be far less invasive than a fusion.

And in my case – if fusion does end up being the thing, I’ll probably have them fuse 2 or 3 vertebrae all at once. There’s so much instability there already and the problem with fusing one is that it destabilizes the ones above it…so eventually you’re stuck getting the others done too. I don’t have time for that sort of malarky, If I’m gonna be out of work for 6 weeks or whatever, they can damn well hit them all at once.

But cart before the horse and all that. Guess we’ll see what the report says, but at least now I know it wasn’t all in my head.