Egregious Spine

by Allison Pang

A bit of a rant to come.

If the body is a temple, mine is surely inhabited by meth-addicted rent-boy elves, tapdancing along my spine with shoes made of nails and razor blades.

How else to explain why...WHY now - six months after my double fusion where my back was fixed and things were good...that my arms/hands/fingers are now going numb and burning all the time?

Egregious spine, indeed.

Oh, wait, here's the answer.

Yeah, not one, but TWO herniated discs shoving their sticky little innards where they don't belong. (Namely, into my spinal column.)

I had the MRI done on Monday because over the last few months I've been having periods of numbness and tingling in my hands and fingers - and finally on this last week it's been 3 days of the left hand being numb...and then that stopped and it's been 4 days of the right hand being numb.

It moves. Exciting.

Two nerves are being hit, which is why both the left and right side are going off (but more on the right than the left, so my right side is worse.)

The only good news about this is that the bulging is centrally located - there's a little more breathing room there - if they were on the right or left side only, I'd be in an extreme world of hurt. As it is, it's just dreadfully annoying more than anything else. Sort of feels like my hands are constantly asleep, with some mild wrist/elbow pain. (And sometimes the fingers burn bad enough I have to put band-aids on them because I can't bear to touch anything, though that tends to come and go.)

*ahem*

At the moment, I'm not sure what the plan of action is. There's a chance an injection of steroids or two will bring down the inflammation enough to give me some relief, but that's a short-term fix. The evidence in the picture says this has been going on for quite some time - there are bone spurs along the vertebrae signifying where the body has attempted to heal itself and failed. Most likely there's another double-fusion in my future (probably in the next six months or so.) I'm waiting on my surgeon to text me back as I type this.

Yay, me.