serah[DOT]nu

Although I’m continuing to have to take pain medication in addition to having the lidocaine and steroid shot to the back of my head that I did (whose name I will eventually, for the life of me, remember… I know it’s the one that begins with dex), I’m not quite as miserable as I was leading up to yesterday… or after I got the actual shot when it didn’t almost immediately take away the majority of the pain like it usually does right then. I think I’m going to stick with the lidocaine and steroid shots for as long as they are useful, conceding the fact that they have begun to grow… less useful over time, although the RFA (radiofrequency ablation, “the probes”) seems like it’s more of a miss than a hit to me, and especially not a direct hit unless you hilariously count one of my nerves being nicked by the needle in the process of numbing. That really hurt!

Fioricet is also beginning to work less than it was, or less than it had been, so I know that I’m starting to round the corner on that medication. And that’s a damn shame, because for awhile it worked phenomenally when needed. Now it just… doesn’t. So that’s one less useful medication for me. And I’m not even going to begin to think about the possibility of using opioids right now because we’re still in the War Against Pain Patients, even when the patient’s history of having tried everything under the sun is conveyed over the course of years of her medical records. I mean, what other options are there out there? Other than one of the most obvious ones if not the most obvious one, which is “this pain is never going to become well-managed”.

Sigh.

So I got a lidocaine and steroid shot to the back of my head to try and relieve the pain from the fact that one of my nerves was accidentally punctured by the needle meant to numb it when I was having radiofrequency ablation done on that nerve. (And yes, it was exactly as painful as this blog post intends on making it sound.) Normally these injections block all pain on that side of my head for about a day, and they markedly relieve the pain for the next few days — they’re meant to get you over the hump of acute pain. But I was only pain-free for a few hours before I could actually begin to feel the pain coming back where I had the injections, which has never happened before. So I’m not sure if these nerve blocks are as effective for me as they used to be, or what other options I should explore to minimize or eliminate migraine pain. Or it might be that those nerve blocks were administered because of traditional migraine pain and this was my pain management clinic’s first attempt at administering a nerve block for actual, acute nerve injury. I wonder.

Either way though, I’m miserable at the moment and am waiting for other pain medications to kick in…