Hi,

I'm Melissa and I'm with Jennifer in the west Denver area. She's had RSD since 1993 and is at the point where she just can't stand it. She describes the pain level as between an 8-9.5 a lot of the time now.

She's been through all kinds of treatments but because her original injury was a workers comp case and they fought her every bit of the way, they didn't diagnose the RSD in time to really help her much.

But we've been to a chain of doctors over the years.

I'm her family caregiver, I take care of her, cook meals, do wash, drive her anywhere she needs to go, etc. We live in the same household.

I've been working at keeping her going all this time, with this discouraging disease.

She's been on a host of drugs and up to 90mg a day of methadone, and is running out of hope with this.

For the last couple of years we've been hearing about amazing results, even potential cures, using ketamine infusion.

We went to see one doctor here, who had done ketamine infusions at Sloan Kettering and was very optimistic about them, but the last we heard, he couldn't get his hospital here to allow him to do it here.

We've both been on disability for different reasons since 1994 and don't have much money, we barely pay the bills. Her insurance is a medicare supplement with Secure Horizons, and we understand they still consider ketamine infusions an "experimental" treatment, despite the successes we've heard about.

The latest we've heard was that the ketamine infusions have been done through University Hospital Pain Clinic, but that of course is "experimental" and we run into the same problem, of them being "out of network" for her etc.

Even then, we tried to get a referral so we could at least fight it with the insurance company, but we suspect that some of these doctors may be playing ball with the insurance companies and not caring about helping the patients, so that fell through and now we have to start all over again with a referrral to an in-network specialist first.

It's SO frustrating, when she's at this point and everything.

But does anyone have any ideas how someone in her situation can get the help she needs, and possibly cure this horrible disease with the ketamine infusion?

Please, she needs help with this so badly.