Up Date

Update for some that have asked!

Ive attached a procedural description of RF ablation that I find really gross as well as some sad stuff from confused people in pain who had RF done. This could have been me.

AND SO,

Im not doing my last round of radio-frequency nerve ablation today. This was supposed to be a nice way to wrap up me talking in detail about my pain journey after having zipped into my new posture & send me off into post-op healing with empowerment and positive fortitude, but it didn’t work out because ablation is not the fuck for me. It sucks because I think stepping back from a relieving procedure that I was in hot pursuit of for so long invalidates my pain, which anyone with chronic stuff can tell you all about. Getting all surgered and fucked up in the hospital is validating, but is not always appropriate. Surgery for pain is like getting a tattoo.... you’re probably gonna get a lot more after that. It becomes a goddamn lifestyle. I do not wanna go down that road at 25. 

They were gonna ablate 6 facet nerve roots at 3 different vertebral levels in my low back, which is a lot. It’s a cover up method of killing the tissues instead of fixing the structural problem. The reason I’m in pain is not because of arthritis or age-related disc degeneration (the mean age of RF ablation is 59). My spine is hyper-mobile from bad, intense, flexibility-obsessed yoga with bad posture so I need to feel my nerves as I fix that. I’ve had to relearn how to breathe, stand, lay down, pick things up, and walk over the past year and a half. I still have a long way to go; a lot of conscious effort to put in as I rewrite proprioception and muscle memory and even positions of joints. The amount of relief I would MAYBE get from this procedure for MAYBE a year doesn’t fit into my healing journey of fixing how I use my body. It’s also risky and sometimes has lasting negative affects. I am having lots of burning down both legs after the initial blocks last week. I told the medical team and they didn’t care. I often feel like I am inconveniencing them with my questions. That’s enough to pull the cord. It’s brutal to go through and my body hates it/me/everybody enough as it is. No more guys probing my nerves. No.

This is me working through at least some of the guilt of not taking the easy play. 

Anyways, the above slides are a description of the procedure (U of Toledo Medical Center) as well as some anecdotal bad times that people had. You’ll see that no one really knows what’s going on and they’re connecting on forums like it’s reddit. Yet it’s more helpful than professional info. It’s nuts.

It’s been a hard year or three especially as a young adult practically fresh out of school/diapers but I appreciate being able to express myself and my journey as I’ve tied it cleanly into the self portraiture/self studies. This nerve pain is the very reason I started doing self portrait photography and has helped me cope with it and document my process. I’m hoping my presentation of info is decreasingly intermittent and messy (as well as less heavy) as I practice talking about what has become my entire life and actually kickstarted some pretty cool things. I also hope to eventually use this college degree that they made me pay a lot for. 

Thanks for reading! Please feel free to challenge me or ask any questions.

Update posts are for all tiers.