Chronic Pain & Surgery – Part 2
(Read Part One here.) With decreased pain, I realize my shoulder is hurting me a good amount too. My family practice doctor recommends Dr. Price. He’s a Sports Medicine Doctor and a Family Practice Doctor. He teaches residents and actually spends time with me at each appointment. We try PT & dry needling. I realize that if I move my arm a certain way, it starts to go numb and get tingly. I get a nerve conduction test and they find a damaged c5 nerve. He takes new X-rays and finds a bulging c5 disc. We treat this with two painful injections spaced a couple of weeks apart. My neck feels a bit better but my shoulder and arm have no change. I still have a constant headache.
During another appointment, a resident asks to do an Adson’s test on me. She finds when I roll my shoulder back, the pulse stops in my right hand. Dr. Price does the test too because he doesn’t believe her, but he confirms it. They get excited, they think they’ve found the issue – Thoracic Outlet Syndrome (TOS). He said he’s only ever seen one other case of this in his career. It’s been a year since we’ve started focusing on my shoulder. I cry again because I feel so validated, and so thankful that they listened and believed me.
They send me to a vascular surgeon to get an actual diagnosis. They do some tests and say it’s clear that my first rib (the one on the very top/at the base of your neck) is squishing my artery, subclavian vein, and nerves. He says I need surgery in order to avoid a blood clot. He’s surprised I haven’t gotten one already since this likely started with my accident, 8 and a half years prior. Surgery is scheduled, then pushed back due to COVID-19.
My surgeon calls a couple weeks later and says he wants me to have surgery before the hospitals open back up to elective surgeries. He’s not comfortable with me waiting any longer and the risk of Coronavirus will be lowest right now. I get on the schedule – May 1st. No one can come into the hospital with me. I sit in the waiting room alone, I get prepped for the OR alone, and I recover in my hospital room alone for 3 days.
He removes my first rib and the anterior scalene muscle (which apparently is huge and scarred).The doctor said my rib looked like it had been broken and healed wrong. It was too thick and was creating scar tissue around it and pulling the muscles where they shouldn’t be pulled. He says I likely broke that rib in my fall over 8 1/2 years ago. He cleans up a lot of scar tissue, and has to take out some lymph nodes that are in the way. He has to move by brachial plexus during the surgery to avoid cutting a nerve. As my anesthesia wares off, I realize I can’t feel the right side of my chest or upper arm because of this. Over the next few weeks, feeling starts coming back, but it’s extremely painful at first. I can’t have anything touch those areas unless it’s extremely soft. Four months out, I still have decreased feeling and some discomfort in those areas.
I immediately knew that the surgery worked. I came into the hospital with a bad headache, and I woke up from surgery without nerve pain in my head. For the first time in 8 1/2 years. I was scared to believe it, I kept thinking it would come back. I still have some rough days where it does come back, but they’re spacing out more and more. I no longer have a constant headache.
The first month was hard. I couldn’t do much without causing pain, but slowly I’ve been able to get back into doing normal things. I’m four months out now and extremely thankful for all the doctors who have believed me and helped to treat my condition. I feel like I have my life back. I’m still in physical therapy because I’m still having shoulder pain and discomfort. It’s hard to paint for long periods of time, and I haven’t gotten back into pottery yet. I’m still searching for answers for this shoulder pain, but my head is so much better. I can live again.
You can read my follow up to this post, posted a little over a year later, here.