Epidurals and Psych Testing, Oh Boy!

My primary care physician still thinks it's possible that pinched nerves in my cervical spine are causing some (but definitely not all) of the symptoms in my arms. To that end, he sent me to a pain specialist for an epidural of cortisone. The idea is that the cortisone, one injected into the spine, will disperse through the canals coming off of the spine and shrink any tissue that happens to be inflamed and is pinching the nerves. Sometimes the effect lasts for months, and sometimes it is a permanent fix.

There is a little guesswork involved in finding the very spot to inject the medicine, however, and sometimes it's necessary to get more than one shot. The first shot, which I had more than a week ago, has not helped. I will get another in a few days.

I also had some psychological testing the other day. There were two reasons for this. The first reason is that I want to swiftly and surely shut down any "it's all in her head" arguments by having evidence that I'm completely mentally healthy. I was pretty laid back and kept my sense of humor about me when taking the tests, so I really don't think they're going to show any abnormal stress or anxiety.

The second reason is that I want to have a baseline, a record documenting my mental acuity right now so that it will be easy to see if that acuity changes in the future.

My gut feeling about the testing is that I scored well verbally, was weak with spatial relationships (never a strong suit), showed mathematical proficiency but not much else (what would I expect after being out of school for so long?), and demonstrated some severe weaknesses where memory is concerned. But those are just my guesses; I won't know the results for possibly as long as two months.

I have a followup appointment with my new neurologist the day before the second epidural. She told me at my last visit that if the bloodwork she ordered all came back negative, she'd be ordering a muscle biopsy. I know from my primary care physician that all of my bloodwork was negative, so I'm guessing a muscle biopsy is in my future. I'd love the idea if muscle biopsies generally solved such medical mysteries as mine. From what I've read, though, it seems they're like all the blood tests I've had - they may or may not show something that a person may or may not have.

I'll update the blog when I know more. Or when I know only exactly what I know now but have another test result.