Yesterday we drove an hour and a half to Washington’s Tri-Cities, Richland, to the Apex Spine Institute, for a test procedure to see about addressing Jon’s neck pain. His x-rays show the discs between his vertebrae entirely corroded, and the bones are rubbing against each other without any “cushion”…

It’s been a long road—especially because things don’t move quickly with the VA. (We’re immensely grateful that the VA takes care of all his medical—but nothing there is an efficient process.) First he went through a year of physical therapy, to see if that could address the issue—and although he did improve his range of motion, it didn’t affect his daily pain. Then he got passed to the spine institute to talk about surgery, and their process of tests and appointments took another year before they tried to schedule him—right in the middle of our busy season. We simply can’t afford to have him out of commission for a month or two of summer, so he had to start all over and try to time it so the surgery-schedule could happen in winter.

At the end of the day, though, when we got closer to it, the idea of having them go through the front of his neck to mess with his spine… Well, it was just too much. That’s scary stuff, truly. And when he had a panic attack in the doctor’s office (this is NOT a man who has panic attacks!) he took a step back to re-evaluate. When he decided, after all, that he didn’t want to risk the surgery, I felt an overwhelming rush of relief. I was going to support him when he planned to do it, but it had scared me too!

At that point they began to talk to him about ways to address the pain—and we wondered why these options had never been mentioned in the first place! We could have saved almost two years of messing-around and gone straight to pain-solutions.

Yesterday was a “test run,” where they injected an anesthetic at the medial branch nerves that relay pain signals to the brain. They’ll assess the effectiveness, and apparently do at least one more test—and if it seems to work, there’s a more permanent pain block they can do at that site.

We fervently wish they had mentioned this option two years ago! We understand that this procedure is a matter of addressing the effects rather than the root cause of his pain, but it’s the effects (the pain itself) that are the problem for him. And this solution is orders-of-magnitude less drastic than the surgery to replace the discs with artificial material—a major surgery that messes with spinal column and has a recovery time of several months. Jon has been living with daily pain for years. He’s the ultimate in Tough Human Beings, and he never complains, beyond an “Ow” when the spinous processes (the sticking-out extensions of bone) from two vertebrae catch against each other and lock up his neck.

But I know a thing or two about chronic pain, living with Crohn’s Disease. I’ve been largely in remission for more than twenty years (a circumstance that has stumped every doctor and specialist with whom I’ve come into contact over the last two decades), but the memory of PAIN is emblazoned on my brain. So I know that just because it’s there all the time and you might be “accustomed” to it… doesn’t mean it hurts less! I remember, when I turned the corner after a flare-up of half a year, how the unaccustomed absence of pain would be like a new sensation in itself. A glorious one. We have hopes that this nerve-block procedure will bring Jon some of that! And he has already started the slow wheels of the VA to see about similar treatment for his lower back, in case this works.

At least this time we know what to ask for!—pain relief, not rebuilding-the-spine surgery.