Hello and thanks in advance for any help you can give... Im having trouble with understanding what is going on with me and my pain! I switched to a new pain dr bc my other one made me feel uncomfortable, wasnt helping me, and every time i went in his office I was there litterally 4 hours each time! I have 3 kids and I cant schedule appts for 4 hours at a time!... So I found a new one about 3 months ago. He is nice, doesnt make me feel like I have to be a stick and proper, but I just always feel judged when at the pain dr, and it may be due to the way my neurosurgeon treated me...but anyway, this new dr is saying that he thinks the cause of my pain is trigger points??? i feel like my problem is way more severe then muscle trigger point pain.. I have been in pain over a year now with my neck and lower back, and well basically my whole back at times...

I had an accident in oct 11, so last yr, and I had an xray and ct scan when I had the accident, the x ray didnt show anything wrong, the ct scan showed a herniated disc at c5-6, I then had an mri in nov11, it showed, developmental spinal stenosis, disc protrusion c5-6 contacts the ventral cord and further reduces canal diameter to 7 mm, tiny central disc protrusion c6-7, mild spondylosis.... thats the cervical mri...I also had lumbar which showed a disc bulge with mild left neural foraminal narrowing l4-5, this is exacerbated by short pedicles..... I then had an epidural steroid injection in feb 12, this was awful, while the needle was in i had pain radiating through my entire body, i was screaming cry and could not even catch my breath, however, the nurses and dr put nothing of the sort in my operative report.... well after the injection I lost all function of my right hand and arm...I called and my neurosurgeon told me it wasnt from the injection and I needed to go to pain managment...

so thats what ive done, and I dont feel like Im getting the relief I need....the pain dr has me on pain killers, but i can only take 3 per day, and it doesnt cover the pain, I told him at my last visit that I needed to take one more per day at ngiht and he said he was keeping me on same dose... I dont like asking for more pain meds bc I feel like I will be judged and he will just say no like he has already done...

I just feel like there is no end in sight, this will never end, I will just be in pain and not able to care for my 3 small kids and I am just missing so much with them it makes me depressed!

I am going to the dr friday to have these trigger point injections, I dont know if they will help or not but I also know im not a dr but I really dont think that is my main problem! I also looked thru my operative report and saw that my injection from my neurosurgeon was a depo medrol and afterwards I had so much more pain and new symptoms and looked them all up and saw something about arachnoiditis...this sooo scares me, bc I have every symptom...does anyone know anything about any of this that I have mentioned??? would anything in mmris cause me pain? my dr doesnt seem to think it would I guess since he thinks its trigger points? please someone give me some advice or something!!!

Believe me, if you had arachnoiditis, you wouldn't even be able to be typing this, cause the pain would probably have you in the hospital. That is a vvery debilitating condition, and the pain is just horrendous! It's also incurable, and you could NOT even talk on 3 pills a day. The reason you saw arachnoiditis is because ANYTIME they inject anything into the spinal canal, they run the risk of causing arachnoiditis. It doesn't happen often, but it CAN cause it.

When your doc did your epidural steroid injection, he didn't do it properly. For one thing, did he use fluroscopy? Did he use a "monitor" type thing where he could see exactly where the needle was going when he was doing it, or did he do it by "feel" only? If it was "feel" only, he put you in a lot of danger. Also, you should have been put in "lala land" so that you didn't have to feel the pain!!! It's just a local anesthesia, not a general -- and you're awakened as soon as it's over and you can actually drive home yourself after you've stayed for awhile to make sure you're okay.

NONE of the injections ever worked for me, and I'm including the steroids, trigger point, all of them. None worked. They were just useless. And they are just bandaid fixes anyway because if you get relief from them it's only temorary -- you might get relief from a week to a couple of months, and then the pain returns and you need to have another one. So to me, they're pretty useless except the doctors get anywhere from $1,500 to $2,500 to do them!!!

Nothing in the MRI's can cause pain so you're safe there.

The only thing I can see is that your pain is caused by your disc protrusions & herniations plus you have some stenosis & foraminal narrowing. I'm sure you do have pain, but these doctors HATE to give us the proper dosing because they fear that we will get addicted!!! That's HOGWASH. Rarely does a REAL chronic painer get addicted to his/her pain medication as they take them for pain --they are NOT trying to get HIGH. They want comfort, not a buzz!! These doctors are afraid of the DEA. They're afraid that the DEA will come in and ask them why they prescribed a high dose to so and so for pain -- and the doctor will have to explain, etc. The DEA needs to keep it's nose out of medicine and let the doctor take care of his patients!!!

I don't know what to tell you to get him to prescribe a higher dose to you. I've had the same trouble, and I've just had to grin and bare it until I just couldn't stand it anymore, and I went in there crying because I couldn't walk anymore. But my spine is a WHOLE lot worse than yours! Mine is degenerating terribly as I've had 3 open surgeries, and there's more herniations but no doctor will even touch me now. Anyway, I finally got a tiny bit of a high dosage, but it didn't do much good.

I wish you the best of luck. God bless and take care. Hugs, Lee

You or a friend can check for trigger points yourself , then it will give an idea if that is the case or not.

TrP info & location /symptoms
http://triggerpoints.net/symptoms-ch...so-abdomen.htm

for upper body sx this is a handy clickable chart -
http://www.pressurepointer.com/pain_reference_chart.htm

thanks for ur reply...I appreciate ur info...I do have a question, if there are some things in my mri that would cause pain why is the dr thinking it is trigger points?....my neuro used flouroscopy for injection, and after i started screaming and saying i was in pain that i could only best describe as spiderwebs wrapping around me with pain, he took needle out, after injecting .5 ml of depo-medrol and reinserted it at c67 and inserted the other half of the injection... one of the main things that had me scared about arachnoiditis is I read a few letters from people with arachnoiditis who were begging for more research to be done on this disease to try to prevent it, or prevent it from progressing, bc there are 3 stages, (these ppl were able to type their story) and one of the symptoms was the feeling that an insect is crawling on your legs, or the sensation of a water droplet running down your legs, I have that and it does bother me and I have mentioned it to my dr, as well as I have every other symptom that is listed on web md's description, and with being injected with the chemical that has caused it to many people (depo-medrol)...this is where my concern lies...

thanks for ur reply...I knwo I do have trigger points as I can feel them, I just feel they were caused from all the muscle tightening and stress from all this pain that was there before the trigger points...I just really dont think that is my main pain source! thanks for the info

The feeling of water running down your legs is part of peripheral neuropathy. I have that too, and have had it for 26 years. Many of us have that feeling along with tingliing, burning, zapping. We use medication to help control those feelings -- the medication was originally used for epilepsy patients, but they found that it worked well for neuropathic patients. i've been taking meds for that for many years. i do NOT have arachnoiditis.

I know of your concern. I think they probably would have seen it on the MRi if you had it.

God bless & take care. Hugs, Lee

I have had the same pain doc for almost 13 years now. Mutual trust was established a long time ago. It does take some time. One thing that does help is that I try not to play doctor with him. I keep a pain journal and take that in each appt. He appreciates that sort of documetation. When things change and the pain gets rugged, I tell him that what WE are doing is no longer working and that I need him to reach down into his bag of tricks and please try something new. That generally gets a laugh out of him. That also elicates the desired response for me.