It was the beginning of May in 2006. A year had gone by with no response from Dr. Langley. I was trying to manage the pain without medication, but I got to the point where I broke down and finally made the appointment to see the pain specialist Dr. Z recommended, Dr. Beecher. It didn’t occur to me that his office was attached to Saint Luke’s, the hospital closest to my house, until I got off the phone with an address. I’d been to the Saint Luke’s ER once, getting four stitches after I sliced my middle finger (using scissors when I should have been using a knife), many years ago.
I remember walking through the side entrance and making my way to the building adjacent to the hospital, where the physicians offices are typically located. There were two names on the door and inside, a small group of hard plastic chairs and an empty window where a receptionist would normally be.
Dr. Beecher’s office was dark and dreary. On two sides there were textbooks, their spines decorated with gold lettering, and a variety of Native American artifacts dotted around the room. The desk was huge, dwarfing the space.
I wasn’t sure what to make of Dr. Beecher at first. He was about my age, not particularly warm and/or fuzzy but he had kind eyes and listened to me. I told him about my history, my pain, my reluctance to take medication at all, even though we both knew it was a necessity. Any opiate or opioid I took made me 1) sick and 2) constipated. (Dealing with constant constipation is a tedious, arduous, endless process.) Dr. Beecher felt that some of my discomfort must be nerve-related, and he put me on lyrica to address that. He disabused the notion that methadone was only for addicts in recovery. It wouldn’t make me woozy like dilaudid, he said, and it should be fine to take at work. I just had to ramp the dose slowly.
Oops.
I took way too much too quickly and as a result, spent 24 hours puking my guts out over the side of the bed while JT's dad was at our house for a rare visit, for summer vacation. I went back to Dr. Beecher and told him what happened. I didn’t want to stay on methadone, but once we found the right dose, the drugs seemed to help. I continued to take dilaudid for breakthrough pain.
Dr. Beecher was dedicated to finding the source of my pain. He didn’t fully trust the conclusions drawn from procedures performed by other doctors. He wanted to definitively rule out facet joint pain, so I agreed to another facet joint nerve block injection at L4-5. He reassured me that this one would be less painful than the epidural injection Dr. Zimmerman did about one year prior. (Epidural injections are performed at the bottom-most vertebra in the spine, where the needle goes straight up into the spinal canal. Transforaminal injections go horizontally into the spine; far less painful but painful nonetheless.)
None of the injections worked for me. We discussed implants, but I couldn’t go there. It was clear that the pain in my spine was derived from my discs.
In the meantime, my spine continued to slowly crumble.