Hope for the pain

I'm not you're typical cancer survivor. I'm not waking up every day jumping for joy, welcoming the sunrise with open arms each morning.

There's a reason or ten for that. I have a problem called Chemotherapy Induced peripheral neuropathy. It sucks.

Many times, you say neuropathy and people respond with something along the lines of, "Oh, that's the tingling, right?"

In my instance, no, it is not tingling. It's a relentless feeling of burning. Hot, fiery burning. Only you can't pull your feet out of the fire. There are days I don't want to get out of bed. Eyes open up and the pain is there, right away. Hangs out all day until I fall asleep at night. I'm lucky that way; sleep eludes a lot of neuropathy patients.

But there's more! In 2018 I found out I have Stage 3 kidney disease. Then there's the COPD diagnosis. And the last fun thing was mixed connective tissue disease. They call it that when you have more than one autoimmune disease happening to your tissue at once. For me, the two components were rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. Yayyy.

But I'm aiming to make 2019 the year I get them all under control. I'll search far and wide for any doctor who can help.

Well, we're at Step one. I found a pain management doctor who seems to think he can help with the neuropathy.

He proposes a procedure to implant a transmitter in the spine to create spinal cord Stimulation. He says there's a good chance that this could help alleviate the neuropathy.

This could change my life. Seriously.

More as I learn.