Megatheriums for Breakfast

‘Are you in pain, dear mother?’

‘I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room,’ said Mrs.
Gradgrind, ‘but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.’

– Charles Dickens, Hard Times

So a few weeks back I wrote about my back problems. Just to continue the story….

A couple of weeks ago, after continuing lack of improvement (and some deterioration) in my pain levels, the doctor sent me off to get a CT scan of my spine.

My wife drove me across to a nearby medical center to get the scan done, results would be with my doctor the following day.

So, after being scanned, I went home, spent a reasonable evening and just before I went to bed had a dose of the new brand of painkiller my doctor had prescribed, hoping to last through the night.

Instead, at about 1 am, I managed to turn over in a funny way and something seemed to go CLICK! And it wasn’t a good click, let me tell you. In pain, I got up to go to the bathroom and once there everything got much much worse pain-wise. I started to groan very loudly and my wife got up to find me on the edge of passing out, cold sweat, dizzy, the whole damn thing. She got me out of the bathroom, where I sank to the floor and lay on my face on the carpet, unable or unwilling to move.

I’ve found from experiment that a face-down position is the one which gives me least pain, and so it was here. “I’m staying here!” I said, as the pain started to ease a little. Any attempt at getting up created new waves of pain.

We agreed to wait for a while to see if things settled down, so my wife brought me a pillow and a quilt and that’s where I stayed for the next few hours. At about 6 am that morning, we debated and finally agreed that the only option seemed to be to call for an ambulance. She did manage to get me up from the floor and on to a couch to make it easier for the ambulance people, which we managed, but not without re-invoking the whole screaming pain, almost passing out exercise.

So the ambulance arrived and gave me one of those pain-reducing inhalers (which seemed to do very little good). Just before we got to the hospital, they gave me an injection of something stronger (low dose of morphine, I imagine), which after about half an hour waiting in casualty seemed to be having some effect.

In due course I was seen by a doctor, and my wife was able to give her the phone number of the place which had done the CT scan, so the hospital could be faxed a copy of the report.

The good news is that apart from fairly normal age-related deterioration of the spine, there didn’t seem to be any sign on the scan of a prolapsed disc or other nasties. The bad news is that it didn’t show any good reason for the excrutiating pain, either.

I was given more pain relief, and the good news there is that it seems that good old Panadine Forte and Neurofen seemed to be the most effective medications tried so far on my problem. With a good dose of those, my pain started to ease, and eventually they let me go home about mid-morning.

The upshot of all of this is that if I get any more episodes of such severe pain, I’ll need to have an MRI scan done (much more detailed than a CT scan, apparently), but in the meantime, keep taking the tablets. My wife had a good talk with my GP (who had also been faxed the CT results), and her impression is that my problem may still largely be a muscular one, albeit a muscle or two which is severely annoyed with me.

We all hope that I don’t hit another such episode of severe pain, but only time will tell.