Hi,

That's sounds very like my experience with CRPS. I can be having a fairly good day with lowish 2-3 pain, then have an intense patch of much higher pain levels of the 'now I'm stabbing your skin with a million tiny daggers' 5-7 type - which might last anything from 5 to 30 mins. Occasionally during a flare, I'll be at a lvl 5-6 for most of the time and have much worse stabbing pains at lvl 8 or more. My background pain is mostly of the deep icy bone ache type, and it really gets to me at times. Then the flare stabbing pains come and I wish it was just the bone type again!

I don't have an SCS, and have no wish to have one at the moment. Most days I cope ok, so I guess I am very lucky in comparison to some folk on here... I never had nerve blocks so I can't comment on them. I'm taking Lyrica at a low level dose at the moment, which has removed the worst of the stabbing pains for now. When things get very bad I have some lidocaine patches and tramadol, neither of which are as effective as I would like.

From reading and talking to my pain doc and physio, I think CRPS pain can come in waves of differing types and levels of pain - its one of the reasons diagnosis can be difficult. I've always been up front about pain levels with my doc and physio, and neither has questioned it not being a constant lvl 5 for example. Maybe I'm lucky with my doc?

Good luck,

Bram.