Saturday, October 9, 2010

The Mechanical Me

One of the means of managing RSD pain is through implants.  There are two types.  The first is a nifty pump that dumps morphine steadily into your body with a concoction of other goodies to chemically treat the pain.  The second is a device that's about the size of a pager which feeds an electrical current through leads that go into your spine.
I have the latter.
My implant sits just above the left hip in my lower back.  I have two long scars; one runs horizontally where they stuffed the implant in, the other runs vertically over my spine where they fed the leads.  The device runs out of power ever couple of days and I have a special nylon belt with a giant magnet attached to it that I have to position just so to recharge.  Think of those new power mats that let you charge devices by just laying the device on the mat.  Only my mat is on the belt.
It takes me about 15 minutes to get it situated so it transfers the maximum amount of charge, and it has to stay in that spot for about 2 hours to get a full charge.
My daughter thought it was kind of neat, like a robot me.  My son calls them 'my owies'.  Some people just nod and pretend like it's a normal thing, others want to go so far as to touch the power source.
Anyway, it worked great for the first couple months.  I was out and about doing all kinds of walking and travel.  I tried to make up for the several months of life I had lost.
Now it doesn't work much.  I've been told that it's working, but my pain is so severe that it's overwhelming the capabilities of the device.  We'll never know unless I have the remove it, but if they do they'll never put it back in.  I'm not a lucky person so I'll just keep it...

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