Thinking back from the start of this fiasco, it all makes sense now – particularly the part where they start withholding pain med to help gauge your take-home prescription. That is permanently seared into my memory.
It’s so easy to slip through the cracks. I feel like I’ve been fighting a losing battle against the system all year and gotten to the point where just struggling through daily life and trying to deal with this at the same time has left me so physically and mentally exhausted I’m ready to throw in the towel. After seeing the KMS gatekeeper Dr. Knight Tuesday, we’ll do the EMG test, and see what they say about that. I imagine it will be either inconclusive, or find some unrelated issue I don’t care about, like the carpal tunnel last time. Guess what she said when I told her my pain was getting worse and definitely not chronic but acute? “So this has been going on since January, huh – looks like it’s chronic now.”
Fortunately, the first real ray of hope since July came Thursday with Dr Thieman, my new PC out of Loveland. I’m not a religious person, but by some miracle apparently, he was familiar with something at least similar to my issue and and is sending me to see a spine guy who might recognize it as well.
After the MRI finding was made back in June, I’d have let Brinkis get away with blaming it on me! All he had to say was something like “…occasionally we see this in older patients with weakening structures due to disc degeneration, etc. It’s not too serious, just takes a long time to heal, so now we need to…” And that would have been the end of it. This is starting to feel like an “innocent until proven guilty” proposition where nobody even wants to look at the evidence. They are maintaining my toxic annular tear innocence at all cost. Too bad I’m the one paying the bill.