The Puncture Chronicles – A Subdermal Saga

This is just a running diary of the skeptic-turned-believer’s introduction and experiences with

acupuncture (hereinafter, ACP).

For clarity, I should add this:  I truly believe that acupuncture can relieve pain, but as you can tell by the many posts regarding the ongoing saga of my neck, it’s not a cure.  I think if I had to take a stab (har har) at it, I’d say that it can relieve enough pain to aid in relaxation which in itself can lessen pain severity.  I truly wish the results had been permanent, as the current radiofrequency ablation process… hurts.   This was fun to write – I’ve developed a taste for satire.  Aug ‘09.

Friday, August 29, 2008 –

It wasn’t a good day.  Lets just say that if weeks were cars, this week would have been a Gremlin on it’s last legs – rusted out, an unidentifiable smell coming from the back seat (passenger side), oil-burning and getting about 10 miles to the quart, cracked windshield that cannot be cleaned due to the pits in it, second gear almost unusable, missing on one cylinder, floating headlights (think traffic tickets), heater stuck in the “on” position, and a key-jobbed exterior with a primer-gray driver’s-side door.

A few, ok three, projects are all clamoring for attention, two of which are wanting it right now and while everyone says “no hurry”, they mean “we’re all gonna die”.  So, could I actually take a break when the ol’ neck started thumping?  Noooo.  Quite the opposite.  By the end of the week I finally came in to get needled like I had wanted to do around Monday and Tuesday.

I walk into the the Porcupine’s Lair and am greeted by Phoenix, the antimicrobial-facial-wash canine.  She’s the office’s PR Officer and she’s good at her job.  Shortly Le Porcupine comes by and as if I was a long lost prodigal son welcoms me to his practice and tells me to go into a spare room and do whatever I needed to do to get comfortable and that it would take about 20 minutes before he could see me.

So I spent 20 minutes lying on the table reading about a new theory involving extra dimensions in an attempt to make the universe make more sense (in the hopes that they finally explain Inertia to me).

LP came in and asked me how I was doing.  The usual, where the doctor or ACP guy wants so badly to believe that I’m truly healed and better that they project their wishes onto my recovery.  In other words they listen to what they want and say rather than what I’m telling them, that life is not back to normal yet.  It is better, lots better so don’t get me wrong, but it leaves a lot to be desired.   I will consider it normal again when I can get on my bicycle and do 70 miles w/o pain.

So I get up on the table and he does a short course down the length of my spine on either side.  20 minutes then flip onto my back (sans needles).  Here’s the way the needles fell:

Left foot – a needle in the cuticle of the “index toe” – a needle in the front of the ankle – a needle between the big toe and the index toe

Right foot – a few in the arch and top of foot.

Right hand – index finger at the base of the nail and jog 5mm to the left – between the index finger and thumb – the inside of the wrist

Left hand – inside of wrist – and one in the crook of the arm not far from a vein

Head – one in the center of the forehead – one on each side right above the canines about 1cm from the nose

The worst one?  The right index finger.  These were all places where the meat is thin and bone is just a hair’s-breadth away and tender.  The one in the finger though… have you ever had a dentist give you Novocaine and start drilling but what was discomfort suddenly becomes a live-wire-agony situation?  You know the imperative you have to get him the hell away from you?  Well, that’s the signal my body was trying to give me about that finger.  For about 40 minutes.  I was twitching and drooling froth by the time he came back in.  You’re thinking:   “What a wussy douchebag.”  I’m here to tell you that if you are in a location just so then any spot can be nasty and brutal.

Alas, by the time I left I wasn’t feeling any better.  It happens.  It might just be that I would have been worse last night w/o seeing him, which is an uneasy thought.  The night was spent trying to be calm, do visualization exercises, and think of nothing that was any more stressful than deciding what kind of dental floss to use.

I am better, I truly am.  Just not all better.

Thursday, July 10, 2008 –

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.  Ah, what a piece of work is the story of this month past.

As I have hinted at before, in a lead-pipe style of subtlety, Western Medicine has it’s strong points and it’s weak points.  It is very good at cuts, breaks, punctures, tears, botched self-vivisections, gout, enlarged prostates, sunken arches, gingivitis… all those things that happen to every one of us on a regular basis.  But soft-tissue stuff seems to have gaps in treatability.

Which reminds me…

While I am on that kind of topic, I’m going to take a detour.  Think back, way way back, and reach into the mists of time to 1984 when big hair was good if you were a band member, Orwell enjoyed (posthumously) great notoriety for his fiction, and the Gipper was still hearty and hale and Voodoo Economics was still a fresh idea.  Ish.

This humble writer had a wonderful friend whose father was his doctor and through this association he came to know other doctors on a casual basis.  This other doctor, whom we will call Twill Brovloski in order to protect his Good Name, had upon the wall of his office a shining stained oak plaque with a box wrench cut into pieces.  Upon the brass plate of the plaque was the inscription “To Dr. Twill Brovloski – The Peter Relief Award”.

As a curious young man (both this author and his close friend fit this description with unerring accuracy) the question arose as to how this fascinating and striking plaque came to be.

It seems that a gentleman, who even to this day remains un-named – the good doctor was a good soul who would not have broken his sacred vows of doctor-patient relationship secrecy even under threat of wild equines – this gentleman arrived at the doctor’s office in a most distressed state.  He would not articulate his predicament to the attendant, insisting that he could only divulge the nature of his grave problem to the doctor himself, but again vehemently insisted that it was most urgent.

The man was whisked to an examination room post-haste and Dr. Brovloski was then exposed to the full story leading to the man’s extreme distress.

It seems that the man had, in a flash of twisted insight, felt that his session of “self-love” would be greatly enhanced by the addition of the closed end of the mechanic’s tool which was and still is commonly referred to as a “box wrench”.   It stretches the imagination not in the least to visualize the proximity of the two tools in this predicament – the inanimate tool fully encircling the animate.  The difficulty arose when the hot blood of his ardor could not return to whence it came, leaving the two tools intertwined, as it were.

The good doctor, being of very high intelligence (it was he who helped put this humble author’s arm back together) had a flash of inspiration and quickly sent his assistant on a most important errand.  The assistant sped to the local hardware store without delay and returned shortly with a simple hacksaw blade, sans handle.

Over the next few hours – the clock was ticking even as the ardor was cooling to sub-zero extremes – the doctor and his assistants strove to remove the lifeless tool from the endangered tool by making two cuts 60 degrees apart from one another, where the material was thinnest.

The story had a most happy ending in which the man who arrived with two tools left with one fully functional one (and a great deal less pride, it should be noted), and the good doctor, surrounded by awestruck assistants, was rewarded for his courage and leaderships skills by a memento, a simple plaque for remembrance of a Herculean task well done.

But I have digressed.  My apologies, Constant Reader.  Should you, Gentle Soul, wonder at this story, let me assure you that I told only the truth.

Moving on again…  ah, yes, Western Medicine.

So by this point – the end of June – many things have been tried.  Cessation of wheat, caffeine, sports sex, sky-diving, limbo dancing, bull-riding… none of these activities when stopped appeared to be the magic bullet in recovery.  We tried epidurals, branch blocks, TENS, traction, rest, drugs… with varying degrees of success.  Yes, this is history, and old, but I’m setting context here.

Enter Le Porcupine.  The Man of a Thousand Needles.  The Man of Creosote-Infused Swamp Water.

Le Porcupine reviewed the results of “The Test” and decided that Yours Truly had issues.  This, We knew.  But the physical issues, now… that was interesting.  Trauma, We knew.  What We did not know was that the digestive issues may indeed be the result of opiate-induced mail-stoppage, but this may also be the result of enzyme deficiencies.  It was noted that Yours Truly was eliminating a high amount of carbohydrates.  Which meant nothing to Yours Truly.

The enzyme replacement regimen consisted of Formulation A (pills) 4 pills 3x/day, Formulation B 2 pills 3x/day, and Formulation C 2 pills 3x/day.  Add those up and it looks like an anti-AIDS drug cocktail regimen.  But for enzymes.  The idea being that chronic pain and/or soft-tissue injury can cause depletion of certain important substances that the body requires.

Well and good, We say, except that We do not believe in this stuff!  Never mind that prior to this We did not believe that 6 thousandths of an inch diameter needles would play any part in soft-tissue injury recovery.  Circular thought processes would without fail tailspin down to the final argument:  We didn’t believe in needles, give this a try.

Within days, gastrointestinal discomfort declined and “normal operation of mail services” resumed.

As to pain levels.  Pain is so very subjective.  Even putting numbers 1-10 to it as a patient is next to meaningless (try it sometime, you will see).  Well, the interesting thing is recovery seems to come in plateaus.  Rather static levels of pain, then one very harsh excruciating 24-72 hour period is followed by an improvement in overall condition.  This has happened three times now, the last of which was three days ago.

Stashiu’s input, which was, to wit:  Decrease the medications to the point where you only use it at night in order to sleep.  Pain perception and manageability can be affected by the drugs, and not always positively.

Without even consulting the doctor, We decided that enough was enough in trying to live life drugged.  If Stashiu’s claims had even a shred of veracity, it would be worth short-term pain to gain in the long run.  As of now, 1 vicodin and 1 flexeril at night is all that is being used.  Tossed the valium, tossed the percocet (hurrah!) and went from 3-6 vicodin per day down to current levels, 1 per day for the last two days.    Pain is still an issue and it is imperative to use coping mechanisms taught by the pain psychologist.

But here is the interesting thing, as We are sure Stashiu was trying to convey:  Yes, the pain may not get better, and it might actually increase – but with a clearer mind, techniques for coping with the pain make the overall day more manageable – in the chronic-pain world, it is sometimes the medication that hinders you from coping with the pain you are trying to avoid. How counterintuitive is that, eh?  The other thing to note is that the nature of the pain changes – do not ask me to elaborate because I cannot put it into words.  Lastly, half of the battle is in keeping yourself from getting anxious out of fear of escalating pain. This is where relaxation and visualization becomes your best friend.

Last weekend, again in defiance of doctor’s orders but with great care to not do stupid things, We put in several posts for a relocation of a chain-link fence, complete with quickcrete.  Yes, pain was exquisite and it certainly led to breakthrough pain but the plateau was passed by as that pain began to ebb.  But dammit, it was more than I have done in EIGHTEEN MONTHS.  And having clarity of mind again is a huge huge gift.

Should Stash be reading… I owe you big-time.  You ever need help, and it is within my power, I got your back.

So Le Porcupine and I are about to part ways, with me leaving with a vast amount of respect for him that was not there when I walked in.   Some will say, like I did that “It’s all in your head”  that it is “quackery at it’s best” or that “there is no basis”… that’s all right, it still works whether you believe in it or not.  Even if it is in my head, the only thing that matters is results.  Click  the images to see them get more biggerer.

Le Porcupine did make some remarks last week as he had me on the table, skewered as I was between the toes, through the gut, insides of legs, chest, neck, etc.  He said, “I think you are a whole lot more liberal than you think.”

My face screwed up in an intense expression of distaste and there was a squeaking sound as my sphincters slammed shut.

He then said “And I’m not supposed to tell you this, as it is a trade secret, but I have been using special points that will make you vote for Obama this fall.  I’m really not supposed to tell you that.”

And then he walked out of the room.

Tomorrow will be the last visit.  If I can pry it out of him, I will report to you what those spots are so that you can avoid what has been done to me.

(and no, I’m not voting Obama)

Mrs. Peel, I hope that this in some small way helps. 

.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008 –

Chinese medicine being not-Western medicine, takes a totally different viewpoint from anything that most folks here in the US of A normally encounter.

First, western medicine does not advocate shoving real skinny sharp wires into the skin and tendons of the body unless it is to remove something, put it in, or left there just for the sheer discomfort of it (days-long IV… yah-hoo).

The second unusual approach is to ask “why is this person not getting better?” and also “what is being depleted from this person’s body with the drugs and/or pain?” Naturally it requires a test, in this case whizzing into a container over the course of 24 hours…

[ A quick disruption for a short public safety announcement - when storing bladder-squeezings in the fridge, please do make sure to put a label on the container that says "DO NOT DRINK THE APPLE JUICE". Just sayin'. - thanks, LK ]

… and then sending it to some poor bastard who handles whiz specimens of the 24 hour variety day in and day out. I keep picturing some poor wretch of a human being opening up the container lid (hard to get off) and getting it on himself while invariably splashing himself and inadvertently taste testing as well. (It’s my nightmare, live with it)

Next, one fills out a questionnaire that asks that each question be filled out honestly and without pondering over it too greatly. Questions like:

1. Have you ever touched your elbow with your nose?
2. Do you experience pain when swallowing tackweed?
3. Do you find yourself out of breath when hit in the head by an axe? (yes, I did)
4. When you eat a heavy meal does your bladder spontaneously enlarge five-fold?

So I answered the questions.

Next was a “palpating exam”. That consists of the practitioner poking you in all sorts of places and gaging the discomfort on a scale of 0-3 by the pitch of your screams. This lasted roughly 17 hours (he was in a hurry today).

Next was a liquid drink test. Le Porcupine stepped out briefly and returned with something that resembled storm-drain runoff in a cup plus an ominous-looking glass of water. Describe it? I don’t know if I can.

Ok. Imagine a workboot that has been worn while fighting fires for three days without having the dirt and grime knocked out of it. Take that dirt/grime/smoke and tap it into a bowl. To this, add powdered yak snot, grindings from the charred-on BBQ drippings, the dried mass of seven generations of mildew from next to a leaky urinal, pubic hair from 87 pygmy shrews, ground earthworm, pulverized toad skin, last year’s leaves (maple), two apple seeds, fermented and dried kelp, stale moldy bread, strychnine, dried and ground lima beans, and finely crushed crab and walnut shells. Oh, and add in some star anise for flavor. Mix well with brackish swamp-water. If you have the dust of shattered dreams, now is the time to add that as well. You should have about two-quart’s worth of liquids and sediment.

Now pour it back in the boot, give it a stir, and drink it directly out of the boot. Bury the bowl and for heaven’s sake keep it away from children and expectant mothers!

Again, notice that going in I was a total skeptic because I could not imagine how it would work. However when you are so desperate to get better and be drug-free that you will cut back to one cup of coffee a day and go without wheat for two weeks, you are about to start snorting battery acid if someone tells you it might work. But the needles worked, and this might work, too.

But, I’ll be damned if for a few minutes there I didn’t feel better. What is really strange is that in the second palpating session the severity of the pain was decreased. One data point does not a case make, so let’s see if his concoction from today’s results elicits desired results. Fair to say, after a while I felt kind of ucky, but I treated it in the time-honored fashion – I ate a supersized fries, ten McNuggets, and drank my single coffee of the day. Didn’t do a damn bit of good but he did say his mixture would be a ’stress test’ (I think).

More later, I suppose.

Thursday, June 5, 2008 –

Well, of the last seven days, five of them were piledriver days, where the top of my head felt all mooshed out like something being driven into the ground. Everyone assured me that I looked fine. Still not recovered from that trip to the suburbs of Gehenna (would have had the same result), which is why I haven’t written. It’s all a bit demoralizing, really. To have gotten range of motion back and high hopes for pain abatement and then let down kind of hard. Don’t get me wrong, the range of motion is awesome.

Here’s the clincher, though. I ask myself “Do I feel like I can get up and go out and dig up the old posts in the hurricane fence and reinstall them in a different location and add a gate to it?”

The answer is “Sure, I could do it, if I want to be in blinding pain for five days.” (and then I add the modifier “Dipshit” because it captures the true flavor of the dialogue I hold with myself. Finally acknowledging that I was not going to do a century ride this summer was like watching my puppy get fed salmon. A slow death of something you love.

So we can poke needles in me all we want, the doctors can do all sorts of PT, drugs, muscle relaxants, pain modifiers, etc. and none of it means a damn thing, they all suck ass. Until I can lift weights, train to ride my bike across the US, play with my kids… it doesn’t work, it’s not right.

Le Porcupine keeps saying “The question I ask is ‘Why is Lemur King not getting better?” So with a simple test of bodily fluids he hopes to see what my body may be lacking. To look in his office he has a great deal of bottles with unusual names of herbs and other substances. I like to look at them and using my imagination translate into Lemurese. The list would be something like this: Frog gonads, giraffe eyelashes, red clay, poison sumac, blue wire insulation (charred), gnat clouds, spores, rabbit guano, jimsonweed, ground glass, yak snot, scotch bonnet, boiled pacifier, caterpillar squeezings, dessicated banana slug, cat urea, rooster milk, BSE (Bovine Spongeform Encephalacy) ruminant-jerky, cockroach shells, poached kittens, hide tanning compound, rosin, depleted uranium, and mule deer gizzards.

My imagination is fertile ground. Either that or ground fertilizer.

So we’ll see. He’s confident that I am lacking crucial enzymes that play a part in healing. I told him that if he said a battery acid enema would turn the trick, I’d jump on it like a deranged slinky.

Fri, May 30, 2008 -

It’s early afternoon and haen’t seen Le Porcupine yet. Travel last week did me in and set me back weeks. When I got to see him Friday afternoon last, I couldn’t tell you if he did any good or not. It wasn’t for lack of needles. I looked like Pinhead from Hellraiser.

Had to up my intake on pain meds through last weekend and most of this week but am dropping them back down. There’s going to be some experimentation here. Not enough so that I’m going to be looking at rebound headaches, but I want to see if the meds themselves are causing some of the problem. If that’s the case, good riddance! At the same time, if it’s *not* the case then this next week might be very uncomfortable. If that is the price of figuring out how to be normal again, so be it.

Yes, I’m depressed – there is a shocker, huh? As I told my doctor, my responses here and to him have been filled with excitement over incremental changes. To date I can’t do anything really strenuous (travel, move couches, push lawn mowers, etc.) without paying for it. But my motion is undeniably better, that is truth. It is amazing how tiny if a movement is required to turn it all to shit.

I just want my damn life back, no pills, no heating pad, none of that stuff. I have given up on the Century bike ride this year (One Helluva Ride). That was a turning point in my depression – it went asymptotically downward.

An indicator of how badly I want life back the way it was – I tried a wheat-free diet, and now I am doing without caffeine. There’s the killer. I’m a 2-4 pots of coffee a day kind of guy. I think slower, talk slower, and I’m crabbier than a centipede with athlete’s foot. Of course, perception is relative. For all I know I might have sounded like Alvin and the Chipmunks before.

Tonight I visit Le Porcupine. Wish me well.

(TIME PASSES)

Ok, it is now 2:35am Saturday morning. Le Porcupine was troubled by the setback I suffered from traveling two weeks ago (as I am). He did a certain grouping of needles that was more like when we first started, including doing the tendons in my ankles. No sensation of “Damn, he did train with the CIA”, but I have to say that whatever he did dislodged a lot of toxins in my system or something because I again feel like dogshit (MIL-D-6352-C, Type 2, Class IIIb). Really really cruddy, like the flu without the runny nose, cough, or sore throat. Damn.

Fri, May 16, 2008 -

Le Porcupine mentioned that he read through this blog. I’m unsure if I offended him or not. I truly hope not because he’s a good guy. He kept saying “Ok, I’m going to live up to my ‘Le Porcupine‘ name, so get ready.” And then this real low sinister laugh and cackle. Maybe that part was in my head. It’s so hard to tell some days.

He stuck me pretty good. I’ve been pushing hard trying to exercise and get back into shape so I don’t know how long it will last. I was hurting pretty good last night and the night before that, so who knows?

Right now I’m smarting again, but I can attribute that to doing too much – lawn mowing, an hour on the bike and treadmill, cleaning around the house, etc. Heating pads are our friends. Not our really really good friends but good.

One thing I’m noticing and those of you who in the future have an accident… you’re going to notice that when you are asked by the doctor how you are and you’re all tickled-off-you-ass-pink about improvement (because you felt horrible before) there seems to be a disconnect. You will probably mean it in a relative sense, “I’m damned happy for the step up in matters!” but the doctor will hear your exuberance and take that to mean you’re feeling rosy about everything. If you can’t get it across to the doctor just how effin’ miserable you were to begin with (and I doubt you can if he or she hasn’t been in an accident) then there will always be this disconnect.

I wouldn’t wish ongoing whiplash symptoms on anyone but it might help in the communications area.

That’s all for now. I’m going to make the rounds on my blogroll.

Wed, May 14, 2008 -

Saturday went to see Iron Man, but it was marred by the fact that Friday and Saturday were spent with what I will delicately describe as “alimentary issues of the voiding type”.

The stuff has naproxyn in it and it does not agree with me. Unfortunately I will not be taking Imitrex again. There’s a waste of $40 for eighteen pills. Or put another way $40 for a laxative I didn’t want.

Did get into the gym both Monday night and last night. Still have a lot ahead of me to catch up to where I was, as I’m only burning 500 calories in a workout. I’m used to 1200 in a workout. Oh well, this too will come.

I’ve paid for it both nights and last night it triggered off an episode, so today is the day I wear dark sunglasses at work and move really slowly.

Friday, May 9, 2008 -

Took Imitrex. Worked rapidly. Left me feeling “unwell”

Tuesday, May 6, 2008 -

Went to the regular PPP (Pill Pushing Physician) yesterday. Interesting thing.

When I did the two trips to the hospital with the pain way way out of control for hours on end, they said “Migraine” I said “Bullshit”. Why? Because I had no aura, no nausea, no sensitivity to light… nothing that tells me it was a classical migraine like when I was a kid.

So yesterday my PPP mentions “migraine”. I don’t use as many words as “bullshit” but tell him what I had observed. The PPP, who is a great guy, looks at me yesterday like I am some sort of surprise excretion during an exam and combines it with that thousand-yard stare, and after a moment says “Well, there is a spectrum of migraines, and they don’t all have to be in the head.”

The lesson here is that you can have vascularization anywhere, and if it happens to be in the neck and spread out across the head, why then you have the recipe for pain. Lots of it. I asked if it had anything to do with the car accident and he said sure, any kind of stress or injury could set it off.

What could be, is that I have been experiencing a lower grade migraine nonstop for months, punctuated by screaming/crying/punching-things breakthrough agony or 1-3 days at a time of wishing I were dead, preferably by brand new (read: sharp) woodchipper. How ’bout that?

So that could explain why painkillers only blunt the pain and not in a highly effective fashion at that. The ACP would relax the muscles around said vascularization and relieve pain.

“What do you do for something like this?”, I asked my PPP. He chirped brightly with a dazzling smile, “Imitrex. Not long term, but it’ll tell us if we’re on the right track.”

The cost is unholy bordering on truly Satanic, with even the co-pay it was quite expensive, but on the other hand, how much are days on end being lost to pain worth?

We’ll soon see, as I am starting to notice the warning signs of one that will strike within the next 2-3 days and they are sufficiently strident that I can tell it will be a doozy. I’ll keep you posted.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008 -

If I’m going to extoll the miracle of ACP, then it is only fair to use an openness policy which goes both ways. Today… eh… meh… feh… oh, I don’t know. Put simply, I hurt. Not a great day. But it would be unrealistic to assume every day would be a good day. I think it’s just something is out and I’m stiffened up from it. More tomorrow.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008 -

Le Porcupine did me again today (with the needles). Nothing you haven’t heard me describe before except for one little twist. Without warning, he came running at my head and in a giant underhand motion skewered me through the temple with a needle. If he was trying to pith me, it was a failure. If he was trying to cause me a huge amount of surprise and some pain, he succeeded. Did that in multiple places around my head. It’s distressing to have needles in your scalp.

Oh, remember how I estimated the needle diameter to be between 0.007″ and 0.010″? You don’t? Ok, fine, whatever, I measured one today with my calipers and came up with 0.0063″ … not a bad estimate by eye, for something so small. Your fingers can feel ridges and bumps and cracks to better than 0.001″ with practice, but gauging the diameter of something that small – use your eyes or an instrument, because your fingers will fool you.

Monday, April 28, 2008 -

Overdid it Saturday. Got the snowblower out and got it running. It hadn’t run all winter long because I forgot to summerize it. So I got in there and HOSED the float with carb cleaner and sprayed up the mower’s cloaca (there’s that word for you McGoo).

Pull-pull-pull-swear-pull-pull-pull-don’t swear (daughter watching)-pull-pull-pull-choke-pull-pull-choke-rrrrum-rumm-rumm-RRRRRRRRRMMMMM.

I couldn’t do that all winter because it was 5 degrees out, but butt was frozen to the patio, and I couldn’t feel my gas-drenched fingers. So I did the snowblowing the hard way. By hand. And it did not do my neck or back any favors.

Anyway, I felt good enough from Friday’s ACP visit with Le Porcupine I did a lot. More than I should have. But I enjoyed being USEFUL again! I have hope again. Yesterday and today, pain, bearable except at the very end of the work day. But I was USEFUL.

See the Porcupine tomorrow and see what else he’s got up his sleeve. He hasn’t yet told me to take two needles and call him in the morning, so I’m curious.

Friday, April 25, 2008 -

Saw Le Porcupine today. The visit was enhanced by having had a session with the pain psychologist the day before, where she spent some time with me in visualization. It is useful for misdirecting the body and getting it to relax in spite of itself. It can help reduce the pain that is there because of your tenseness, which is no small task, given that you are generally wound up so badly that all your sphincters are tight enough that you couldn’t drive a hatpin up your butt with a sledgehammer. I’m finding that the mind is a very crafty but very dumb thing at times. You can fool it into thinking a lot of things, which is probably how we get through life without screaming out the remainder of our existence.

Anyway, visualization also helps you figure out what’s real and what is stuff that your sado-masochistic body decided to tack on for fun. My guess is that my past years of abusing my body with alcohol are catching up, and now my body is engaged in this passive/aggressive BS and trying to nip me in the ass every chance it gets. Paranoid, yes, perhaps. But it isn’t paranoia if your body really is out to get you.

So, I meet with Le Porcupine in his lair, and being the very nice guy that he is, he listened very intently to what I had to say (which is rare if you are talking about the Western medical profession). He told me to change into my shorts and said “We’re going to lay you out face up first today, and we might try to do those tendons again”. Here I voiced my concern that perhaps, after all, he had been with the CIA (see the entry for April 11). He laughed maniacally with this furtive/nervous glance and a hint of a facial tic. (actually all that was my hyperactive imagination in overdrive – he’s a very calm person)

So, again with the “Does it hurt when I do this?” routine. At one point there were three spots around the left shoulder where the pectoral starts to transition to the humerus where he said “Does this hurt” and kind of had to assume a yes based on my high-pitched grunt and sobbing. Surprisingly, he said “I’m not bearing down hard on those areas – it’s the same amount of pressure as everywhere else.” I’m thinking to myself that it can’t have been right, it felt like Gallagher had hit me with a huge ball-peen hammer in that really small area.

So… ankles, wrists, spot in the meaty area twixt the thumb and forefinger, gut, sides of the neck… everywhere. He walks out saying “Don’t get up and walk around, you’ll scare the other patients.”

What the hell was THAT supposed to mean? Ok, ok… Don’t ask.

Some indeterminate time later, perhaps years, he comes back in and pulls the needles and has me roll over. Same routine as before, poke, OW, poke, eh, poke, YIYIYIYI. Then he hit this one area that leads up to the neck from the shoulderblade area and HOLYJESUSMARYMOTHEROFGOD. Uh-uck-uh-huh-uh-grrrk-uh.

“Tender there?” he says. I would have thought that the sudden pain-induced vomiting would have been indicative of it being an outside the norm issue for me.

So when all was said and done, I got up and damn if I didn’t feel better than I had all week long.

I am now a converted true-believer in ACP.

I will probably get to sounding all righteous like a reformed whore about the whole thing, but I had been so disparaging about it for so many years that if others can potentially be helped by this they should waste no time in finding out. Western medicine had tried many things and though they were all doing the best they could and were all skilled and caring, something fundamental wasn’t getting addressed.

I went from a hard-boiled skeptic who was thinking “Sheee-it, I’ve got nothing to lose” to someone who has hope that full recovery is within his grasp.

At this moment I am still doped up but that is because the muscles that were so FUBAR’ed all this week and some peripheral ones hurt. The hurt won’t go away overnight, but he got them to relax, which is a miracle.

Tues/Wed/Thurs, April 22, 23, & 24, 2008 –

Life sucked. Spent three days trying to sleep off what was presumed to be a migraine but never did sleep it off, and no painkillers worked more than an hour or so. It was horrible. In retrospect, given the absence of light sensitivity, no aura preceding it, no nausea, and based on past experience, I don’t believe it was a migraine but rather something seriously out of whack and pinched in my neck. Godawful stuff, wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Well, maybe a little.

OLDER STUFF – IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

Monday, April 7, 2008 -

First visit. Lots of questions about past medical history, prior accidents (he needed to go get more paper ’cause he ran out – and you can stop laughing now Enas).

Finally it was time to really stick it to me, so to speak. Got undressed to a pair of shorts I brought with me. Sorry ladies, but I do not have Charlton Heston’s buns – best we nip that in the bud right now.

Laid face down on the table. The routine went a lot like this:

1. fingers walk down the spine, counting off vertebrae – no “eenie-meenie-minie-moe”, so it was in some small way encouraging
2. push extra hard to let you know that we have arrived. This is evidenced by the spasmodic twitching of the lower extremities and sudden loss of bladder control
3. request that the pincushion patient take a breath then let it out, and then slam that puppy home
4. repeat as often as desired, because after all, you just can’t have too much fun

Actually, most of the time you don’t even feel a gosh-darned thing. Butterfly burps are more forceful. Based on years of looking at small stuff (I design small mechanisms a lot as an engineer) I’d have to say that the needles are somewhere on the order of 0.007″ to 0.010″ in diameter but I’ll put a set of calipers on them next chance I get. Only occasionally was there a spot where it was uncomfortable and he was more than willing to reposition needles. Let’s put some perspective on this. A tattoo needle is a jackhammer to the ACP needle’s butterfly burp.

Then you lay there with some really relaxing music in the background. First cycle was lots of needles in the mid and lower back. Don’t ask me why, but the heavy sensation and almost but not quite warm sensation I was feeling about ten to fifteen minutes into it was up in the shoulderblades and low neck region. I think I got a bit claustrophobic a few times but it was the kind that isn’t from being in a confined space but much like when I had a full-arm cast put on. It was the feeling of being stuck (pun not intended) there and unable to do anything… more of a case of my control-freak nature being balked. Years ago, the full-arm cast gave me fleeting impulses to chew either it or my arm off to be free of it.

After a half hour, the shrimp on the barbie got flipped (me) and he stuck me in a number of places up front – shoulder, what I think was the gut, maybe an odd leg or two, and the insides of my feet. Another 15 minutes went by.

Ok, that went well. What I noticed when leaving was that I was woozy and kind of almost disoriented – only, “how could you tell there was a difference?” you might ask. Go on, ask it. I’ll wait.

Got that out of your system? Good. Moving right along.

When I got back to work my thinking was really slow (a good metaphor would be “the unresponsive soft and mushy brakes of my mind were affecting performance going into mental turns”). The sensations at work might have been related to overindulgence in sniffing dry-erase markers, but you gotta calm down somehow. Otherwise I’m a man of few vices so cut me some slack, all right?

As of tonight, I officially feel like dogshit (MIL-D-6352-C, Type 2, Class IIIb). Interesting thing is that it is a general malaise that predominates, and yes, the usual core problem areas hurt and a bit more than average. But the nature of the pain is subtly different – AND – I now have greater range of motion but without a corresponding increase/penalty in the pain level usually associated with that motion.

I remain still critical and detached, yet I cannot deny that the procedure has elicited some changes. It is too early to qualify them as positive changes, I think. It would be jumping the gun to say that it was necessarily positive. An illustrative analogy would be to say that by taking arsenic, I see a change so it must mean that things are getting better. Well, no, change is not necessarily better, but it really depends upon the context. Too early to say whether our analogy uses arsenic or ibuprofen.

I am very very cautiously optimistic. Next visit is on Friday.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008 -

Ok, so last night sucked ass. Around 4am I dropped off to sleep. Woke up with an all-over feeling of a hangover, sore, and tender to the touch. Here’s the good part – still retaining the range of motion gain from yesterday. A little bit of pain crept back but hey it’s overall a good change. Not making plans just yet, but I’m looking forward to the chance at having a party to flush the damn things.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008 -

Well, Tuesday was kind of a pisser. Sore as hell but I’m told to expect that too, and that it isn’t unusual. It’s still better than the procedure last August shown in the pic below. After that procedure I was shuffling around like Tim Conway in the Carol Burnett Show when he played that little old man. I had my arm on my wife’s shoulder and she led me into McDonald’s. Got a LOT of stares but I said “Goddamnit, I’m GOING to walk in there and order my food like a *#(%#%* human being.” (and yes, those injections hurt like hell)

click on it for larger image…

Right now I’m medicated and hooked up to the TENS unit – makes for real twitchy muscles but I guess it just tires them out. I know it’s mixing two different things so it becomes hard to tell whether improvement comes from the TENS unit or the ‘puncture, but I’m not willing to be a guinea pig any more than I already am. Science will have to take a partial back seat.

Thursday, April 10, 2008 -

Well, the back and shoulderblades from the neck down are particularly tender, more so than usual – BUT – here’s the interesting part… the nasty vile ill-intentioned headaches (24/7) have tapered off to a background level that I can actually ignore if I’m busy. I mean, there’s still a headache there but it isn’t the chainsaw-through-the-skull-and-it-hasn’t-been-sharpened-lately kind of pain I’ve been living with. This is a had-a-sixpack-last-night kind of headache, which is sort of like the difference between The Rock in the movie Doom (post-infections) vs. Mr. Rogers. It’s all relative.

Friday, April 11, 2008 -

You’ve heard of a Century Ride, right? Where you get on your bike and pedal until you hit that magical 100 mile point and say to yourself “SELF… what sounds nice right now is a big dripping-with-condensation ice-filled ziploc bag for my nuts.” I did a full one two summers ago, got thirty miles through my second one last summer and then said “God, I’m not having fun, my neck is KILLING me.” I stopped at 52 miles. What a downer.

Today was a Century Needle Poke.

I was ready to come in today. Hurting again and wanted to see if Monday was a fluke or not. I’m still very objective/critical of the process and will be at every step.

I lie facedown on the table and the Porcupine says “Ok, put your legs up on these pillows because your feet have to be un-stressed for this one.” He grabs my heel and says to take a deep breath, let it out and he fires off a needle into my Achilles tendon on my right leg. He repeats it on the left. Two minutes go by and…

… here is where I’m going to get wigged out because I did then, too…

… and then all of the sudden I get this burning sensation at the base of my skull at the other end of my freakin’ body . Naively, I wait for the burning to die off or level off, and it keeps getting worse. Now it is like a really freakin’ deep sunburn that goes through to bone – that really bitchin’ tan that went wrong, you know? Then it starts really hurting. I said “Uh, this is like, uh, you know, really uncomfortable.” He says it is important to know exactly how I mean that.

Instead of telling the Porcupine what is going through my mind, which goes something like this: “Ok, it’s like you took sub-zero lighter fluid, pumped a bunch into the base of my skull and simultaneously heated it up with molten lead to the flash point and ignited it” – instead of that clever banter I say “It burns, base of my skull”, “Hurts,” and “Ow.” Brilliant responses on my part, just brilliant. Can’t figure out if I practiced to attain that kind of brilliance or whether I was just born gifted in that way.

He says “Ok, I’m going to take them out – they actually penetrate into the tendon a bit – and we’ll try another approach.”

(TO SELF: THEYDOWHAT??? WHATTHEHELLAREYOUTALKINABOUTDUDE?)

Right… so the needles are out, my neck is still burning like an LA wildfire, and I’m lying there wondering what kind of permanent nerve damage has to occur in order to feel that. He starts rubbing the area where it was burning and I couldn’t tell if it was getting better or not. Eventually it subsided. I’m not exaggerating – imagine running scalding hot tap water out of the faucet continually against the spot and you get the idea – just don’t stop for 3-4 minutes so you really get a chance to feel the love.

There’s fun lurking around every shadowed corner. We go into the “Poke the Patient Until He Screams” phase of the exercise. It consists of poking you in various places rather solidly and focusing on that location if the patient does indeed scream (hence the vivid description). Prevailing theory is that these loci of agony require puncturing.

Blade of the hands, all over the shoulders and shoulderblade areas, the kidneys, the sides, several times in the sides of the neck, base of the skull, etc. The Porcupine, who has an impeccable bedside manner, eventually stops (by design or because he ran out of needles, we’ll never know) and says “you look like a pincushion”. Oh yeah, now I’m relaxed. He’s noticed that we reached that goal and expresses his pleasure

Segue into the next act where once again one must lie still (so very very still), face down, punctured in a bazillion places, and try not to picture a well-filled balloon with lots of needles stuck in it. Other thoughts to avoid are “What if the building catches on fire?” and “If I try to scratch my buttocks will I drive one of these into a vital organ and leave me paralyzed and bleeding to death?” It also isn’t helpful to realize that there is a big lightning storm going on outside and that you have lots of little pointy pieces of metal sticking out of you. Wild packs of angry Chihuahuas represent a clear and present danger as well.

Several conclusions from today’s visit -

1. Horrific burning sensations in the neck can be derived from punctures in the Achilles
   
2. ACP can “unwind” things in your fascia and when it does, muscles can twitch violently and nonstop
3. Neck and shoulder issues can result in earaches. Don’t ask me how because I can’t explain it any better than #2 above, but it is true
4. Extreme lightheadedness can result from any and/or all ACP sessions
5. Ditto for nausea and the the more generalized “I Feel Like Dogshit” Quotient
6. If #1 is true, then we can make two guesses
   1. ACP isn’t necessarily proven, but there is evidence that it could be plausible
   2. Referred pain is a very real and potentially strong phenomenon
7. Western medicine has a lot of answers but it completely failed to explain several complaints I had that were addressed by ACP

Currently sitting in my comfy chair – you know what I mean – the chair that has a nice groove shaped just like your butt that is sensual and secure at the same time in spite of the layers of duct-tape holding it together. Feel kind of rotten at this moment but still have better range of motion that when I walked into the Porcupine’s Den this afternoon; Some pain is worse, others better – but overall, I am told that this is significant in that it shows that what I thought was wrong may not have been what was really wrong. Le Porcupine’s stance on this is that pain was being masked and/or spread around – sort of the physiological version of the shell game that Congress plays with taxes and social security in funding the entitlement mindset portion of the voting pool.

That’s all for now. More tomorrow.

Saturday, April 12, 2008 -

Short update. Still a decent amount of pain, but ok with meds. I was told that pain might seem to move around as it became clearer what the underlying problems were. Indeed, I have a greater difficulty at present with garbage affecting me just below the neck right now. There were parts of today where if I had to sit any length of time in certain chairs (while making Pink Slime with my daughter – I’ll post the recipe) I had worsening pain and encroaching headache again. That is not the point to this post, however.

Prior to any treatment whatsoever, I was at best able to turn my head in 45-50 degrees either to the right or to the left. I was, with little or no discomfort in my neck, able to turn and look behind me, to the tune of 95-100 degrees, almost my full pre-accident range of travel.

I’m still going to be cautious, for two reasons…

1. Will this level of improvement last for more than a day?
2. Will the pain I am experiencing from pushing it too hard ten minutes ago also go away? (Might have tried too much too fast – not an isolated thing and it is actually part of my nature to “push it”)
3. I’m a very very stubborned skeptic – bulldoggishness is in an enginerd’s brains

Thursday, April 17, 2008 -

Refer to Saturday 12 entry. More of same except more pain, but I think maybe that is because I’m trying to do more. Am actually looking forward to being skewered by Le Porcupine. I still have great range of motion but the aches are still there and are not negligible by any stretch. Nice stabbing pains in the neck now and then. This is better in the sense that it is different. Don’t know if it is lifestyle better but it’s still early. I did give my daughter a piggyback ride on Monday. Paid for it – oh how I paid – but it was worth it and she grinned from ear to ear.

This better hurry up and heal soon because the weather is turning and my new bicycle from last year only has a little bit of miles on it. I want to RIDE. Life is too short to let this kind of shite rule it.

Friday, April 18, 2008 -

After much soul-searching, careful analysis, blindly grabbing for alternative explanations, I am forced to concede that in spite of my disbelief in ACP… there might be something to it.

I mean, think about it. You’re trained to trust Western medicine. You see it work time and time again. You go to school, your base knowledge is rooted in physics with real observable cause/effect, chemistry explains things in repeatable ways, great things are done by the Aristotelian methodology.

But then, along comes another idea, one that just rubs your fur the wrong way. It offends your sensibilities. It is a popcorn kernel’s shell wedged between teeth and gum. It is the persistent wedgie that you can’t address in the middle of your SAT testing

Ok, enough metaphors.

ACP… It is hard to believe in. It explains things in terms of fascia and body energy flow, and rarely if ever addresses the concept of nerves. It allows you to be poked in the Achilles tendon and feel like you are being reverse-garotted with a thin band of hot steel and does not engage in apologetics to explain mechanisms beyond the interlinking of fascia in the body. (Le Porcupine may want to beat me if I’m getting this wrong on details but I’m trying to do right by him)

So, by the time I went to see Le Porcupine this afternoon I was anxious. The char-his-head-off-with-the-needle-in-the-Achilles trick was definitely causing some anxiety. Plus, the headaches had come back by Wednesday all throbby and skull-gouging and bubbly – they are feisty headaches that enjoy a good laugh.

So again with the 300 needles. Le Porcupine stands back – not that I can see him when I’m face-down – and says “You look like a pincushion”. I said “Yep, that’s me… Sonic the Hedgehog”. Where did he stick me?

• The neck, both sides
• The base of the skull, two per side
• The back – all over the shoulderblade areas. Where’er I screamed, he struck, and I stopped counting how many times in that region
• What felt like my kidneys – one on each, I think
• The blades of my hands – one each
• The ankles – staying away from those Achilles (thank you God, thank you)
• The waist line, about two inches below the belt line

Again with the really woozy feeling afterwards. Again with the “I feel like yak snot” all-over feeling that I have come to associate with it being done with positive results.

Let me be abundantly clear: It has not solved the pain issues in the neck – YET. It has resulted in a 200% increase in range of motion. If it just takes a little longer to address the pain, I can be patient. Just getting rid of the ever-present evil spectre of a headache, then I am grateful beyond words.

I asked him if it would be possible to, within a month, get back on my bicycle and start training. He said he thought that it was do-able.

In July is the yearly One Helluva Ride in Chelsea, Michigan, and I look forward to it eagerly. I had to crap out at 52 miles last summer because I couldn’t take any more of the pain (a miracle I got that far, really) and it has eaten away at my soul like a black canker since then. What I set out to do, I do not like to be balked at. So this year, I HAVE to do it and will need to start training soon if I want to do it.

Here’s to hope. If you are dealing with chronic pain, take it from me, the absolute best test case – the confirmed skeptic, that it is worth trying.