Thursday, April 21, 2011

A strange twist in the symptoms: Summer 2010

Late Spring/ Early Summer
After a first round of oral steroids proves worthless and the pain on the outside of my right knee is at an all time high, I am given another round of oral steroids and set up for future nerve root injections.  The pain is so severe that I have trouble simply walking home from class or walking around the boat on a cruise, with the majority of pain focused on the outside right of my knee and right calf, with medium pain down my right leg.

Early in the summer I begin my second round of steroids, after they run their course, I notice a steady decrease in my sharp sitting tailbone pain to a more numbing sensation over the course of a month or so.  Whether this is due to a changed sitting position, the oral steroids, or just the progression of the disease, I do not know but am incredibly relieved that it has become easier for me to sit at work and at the gym etc.  What's slightly disconcerting, is that a few weeks (maybe even a couple months?) after the pain almost turns into this numbing sensation while sitting, I begin to experience slight sexual dysfunction, with the ability to achieve erections much more difficult than before, as well as the absence of random erections and morning erections. What's more, I would rate my normal rigity of erection at about 75% of what it was just a few months to a season earlier.

My leg pain is increasingly worse, making it hard to walk simply from the parking lot to work without severely limping, I try to explain to coworkers who ask me why I am always limping that I am just going through some back issues and figuring things out at the moment, as I have been for almost the past year.



A random set of images from a lumbar MRI for a summer update:

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