Ginnie was a little luckier than I was, but I was still caught relatively early: at least by the standards of 2001. I started having exceptional pain while my ankle was cast, while my ortho had the sense to refer me to a kindly old gent who was considered a founder of pain medicine, he didn't have the sense to tell them to immediately get me out of the cast, but instead doubled my dose of Vioxx to 50 mg/day. It was only a couple of months later, when my internist - looking for an answer - sent me to a rheumatologist, who ran his battery of blood tests, all of which were normal, but who then sat me down and gave me the tentative Dx of RSD.

The old pain doc saw me a couple of days later and I got my first LSB under fluoroscopy, with no change of any kind. He repeated it a week later, but the second time did it bi-laterally, and WHAM: 10 days remission! That, of course, was the "good news" . . .