[swatmedicmama]

Hi all! I'm new here. I'm 31 and from pittsburgh pa. this summer I had an injury that led to compartment syndrome of the hand requiring an emergency fasciotomy and leaving the hand open to close on its own which took almost 8 weeks, plus 8 weeks of IV antibiotics through a PICC. Almost immediately after healing the surgeon said I had RSD, my hand is generally cold, blue, mottled, awful cap refill, all the hair on my forearm fell out, mynails stopped growing. I have extreme allodynia. any cold triggers intense burning like my hand is on fire. They sent me to a PM doc which I was nervous about hearing all these horror stories. I guess I'm lucky the surgeon diagnosed the RSD as soon as I complained of burning pain and he saw the color changes and stuff. The pain doc gave me ketamine troches and has me coming in today for a 5 day inpatient infusion. Seeing how many people here have had to fight to get the ketamine, or to get treated, or diagnosed I feel so blessed to have a great team of doctors. I'm super scared and nervous to see how this goes and hope it works so I can go back to work. This doc is being really aggressive about the infusion since the injury is about 7 months old, and the RSD is really severe according to their scale and he said infusions as soon as possible to the injury tend to have better outcomes.... anyone else ever hear that? What should I expect? I'll keep everyone posted. and does anyone have hints on how to make the troches taste less god awful? I have to have a ton of tic tacs or altoids in my mouth while its dissolving because the taste alone makes me vomit nonstop otherwise.