Pain isn't enough to get you help

Insurance hoops must be jumped through before treatments are given

It’s 2:39 a.m. on Friday and I’ve been awake for an hour and a half, kept up by aching legs caused by problems with my back.

I don’t mind being up. I like the quiet of the night, and I feel comfortable sitting in my chair at the computer (on two pillows).

Before I gave up on the effort to fall back asleep, I was thinking about the last three months and wondering how much of the discomfort I’ve experienced could have been avoided.

Discomfort is a euphemism for pain, something I’ve become intimate with since the day in early October when even touching my right leg to the ground caused electric pains to shoot through it. I had to be carried to the car and driven to the ER.

Five minutes of X-rays and five hours of waiting led to the conclusion that my lumbar vertebrae were compressed, and resulted in a steroid prescription and an assurance I would be called by the physical therapist.

The steroid didn’t help, and the physical therapist didn’t call, so after a couple of weeks, I called my general practitioner, who saw me a week later and prescribed physical therapy.

During that couple of weeks, and since then, I’ve had to sleep in a sitting position, propped up against pillows. I’ve been skipping showers because my legs were unsteady, and I fell once when my foot couldn’t clear the 2-inch edge of the shower as I stepped out.

I groan my way into the car, dragging in one leg, then the other. In the grocery store, I use the electric carts, because otherwise I end up bent over and trembling, gripping the counter at checkout and alarming the cashier.

I regard the bathroom as a torture chamber, the toilet as a torture chamber pot.

All of this might have been avoided if my insurance hadn’t required six weeks of physical therapy, which didn’t help, before I could get an MRI.

With the usual delays in getting appointments, it was mid-December — 10 weeks after I went to the ER — that I was able to get an MRI that showed what was wrong. 

“Scoliosis and multilevel degenerative changes, most significant at L3-L4 where there is disc bulging and a more focal central disc extrusion with cephalad migration resulting in severe central canal stenosis,” the MRI report says.

I don’t know what cephalad migration is, but I know this is bad news. After seeing the MRI, my doctor referred me to a spinal surgeon, who sent me to a pain management clinic, where a doctor said a cortisone shot should deliver some relief, as long as my insurance approves it first.

Every health care provider I’ve seen has been helpful and busy and running behind. Even I feel like I have to rush in a doctor’s office, because I’m aware of how pressed for time they are.

There are treatments for my problem, and it looks like I’m going to get one of them soon. But meanwhile, I’ve suffered for 14 weeks. That seems wrong.

On the bright side, I have a newfound empathy for those people who end up addicted to painkillers, because I sure have wanted something stronger than ibuprofen and acetaminophen as I sweated and moaned and cried my way through the last three and a half months.

Not that I have it hard. I’ve had lots of wonderful help and support and I know that many, many people are enduring worse for longer and that they, too, are not getting the help they need.