Hello everyone,

I am new here and was hoping to build a support network regarding these terrible Tarlov cysts. Also, I really just want to rant for a bit to people who understand what I'm going through!
Here's my story-
About 10 months ago I started experiencing intermittent shoulder pain across my clavicle. It wasn't terrible, so I didn't think much about it and brushed it off as stress. Then about 5 months ago, I started having headaches that would originate in my shoulder and move up to the temporal region on my head. Again, being a full time student at UC Berkeley, I dismissed it as stress and picked up a prescription of Vicodin from my doctor. Then, 3 months ago the real pain started: I have been experiencing severe pain in my neck and upper back that has been radiating down my right arm and across my chest.
My doctors were simply "guessing" what could be wrong and put me on various medications to try and "alleviate" the symptoms.

I've been passed around from doctor to doctor, physical therapist, social worker, etc for so long that I finally demanded an MRI. In my head I thought "how can you treat something if you don't know what it is?!" The MRI revealed a few things: C3-4,C4-5, and C5-6 all show signs on mild foraminal stenosis and there is mild facet joint hypertrophy along with a trace annular bulge. It's also showed that there are bilateral perineural cysts at my C5-6 level. I knew RIGHT away that these were causing my pain because I've told all of these doctors that it feels like "something needs to be popped in my neck but it just won't pop!"

Needless to say, I saw a "specialist" today who said "I'm not quite sure if that's the source of this pain." I was honestly dumbfounded. I literally pulled the MRI films out, put the scan showing the cysts up to the light, pointed to them and said "These cysts are blocking the nerve exit hole almost completely! How is this not the source?" He said he wanted to run more tests.

All in all, I'm so freaking sick of this pain! I've lost my entire life to this pain and can barely enjoy anything these days. I am taking Percocet 5/325 q 6hours prn (which is bullcrap because it only works for like 2hours), Neurontin 600mg TID, just finished a round of prednisone, and started the Lidoderm patches today.
Out if all of those, the Lidoderm and Percocet seem to work the best, but I'm still freaking hurting!

I'm just tired of this, and some nights I go to bed hoping that I won't wake up in the morning so that I don't have to deal with this pain anymore! I don't feel like I deserve this, but maybe I'm supposed to learn some valuable life lesson from it all?

I don't know, all I know is that it would be nice to talk to someone so that I know I'm not alone in this!

Thank you for reading and listening to my rant
-Jake