The Days of My Neck

This chronic pain demon is messing with me again. My diagnoses are messing with me again. Maybe life is just messing with me again. Yesterday I got a third round of trigger point injections in my neck. The first round actually seemed to alleviate my neck pain a bit. Like maybe 13.4%. But when you live with serious pain each moment of your life, 13.4% feels like the sun has broken through your dark, cloudy, pain-y world. It was good. After the second round two weeks ago, however, the pain got bad. Really bad. Like back in the beginning when I simply could not think straight because all of my effort was being used up in gritting my teeth That kind of bad.

Yesterday I told the neurologist how bad the pain had become since the last round of injections, asked him if he was trying to kill me, pondered aloud if he was in cahoots with Bill to mess with my head…wait, only the first one in that list is true. Sorry, my mind is somewhat scattered because I’M IN PAIN! Anyway, as he is wandering through the mine field that is my neck, needle in hand, this doctor tells me that none of the pressure points that would normally be tender in both myofascial pain syndrome and fibromyalgia (two of my many fascinating diagnoses) are sensitive, so maybe there is “another disease process going on.” Really? REALLY? He is suggesting that if this round of injections, in which the needle landed in my neck only three times, doesn’t help, I should probably get another MRI of my cervical region.

Getting a brand new, shiny MRI is probably a good idea. Lying inside a panzer tank while bombs knock against the sides for twenty minutes will be awesome. But I trust this doctor. Yet I feel like I am being punked with this diagnosis thing. Do I not have myofascial pain syndrome? Do I not have fibromyalgia? This would be a truly weird twist of medical fate because I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in the 90s, then undiagnosed, then rediagnosed a decade later. It’s like I let my diagnosis lapse and then I renewed it ten years later. Kind of like a passport.

So what now? I guess I wait and see what the three needle pricks from yesterday do for me and myalgia. Ugh…I need my heating pad now.

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of my neck.