Pain and Brain

Ok so by the sound of this title, you probably are dreading even saying that you would read my blog for me! No no, don't fret; this is going to be interesting, I promise. So here's the thing. Everyone knows how much the brain controls and its functions and blah blah blah. Tonight, we're going to be talking about my experience with the brain and something that I have a long personal experience with: PAIN. This blog is not a “Please feel bad for me, look what I’ve been through” type blog, so understand that I’m not looking for pity and attention, but sharing the knowledge that I’ve learned.

            RSD. What in the world? Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy. CRPS. Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome. Did I lose you yet? Stay with me here. RSD (or CRPS, which it is now more commonly called) is a debilitating pain syndrome that broadly affects the pain receptors, nerves, and the brain. I’ll make this easier by giving an example first. A young 12-year-old girl fractures a growth plate in her ankle playing basketball. After being put in a cast for several weeks, the X-ray shows a healed bone. However, the girl still complains of excruciating pain in her ankle. The original injury happened on the lateral side of the ankle in the fibula bone. The girl was experiencing pain on the medial side of the ankle (on the tibia). After being told it should get better after physical therapy even though she couldn’t walk, the girl’s ankle bruised and bruised and swelled to a very abnormal size.

            Let me stop here for a moment. This girl is me. In sixth grade, this happened to me. What started as a simple injury developed into a huge “saga”, as my family and I like to refer to it as. To speed this up a bit, in seventh grade, after healing and re-injuring my ankle, I was diagnosed with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy. RSD is a pain syndrome in which the pain receptors and brain are stuck in a miscommunicating glitch. The pain receptors are like a switch. After a bone heals, with RSD, the pain remains and the brain and receptors think that there is still a broken bone. This can be extremely frustrating because there is no scientific evidence as to why there is still pain. You cannot see pain in an X-ray, MRI, or CT scan. The only way to diagnose RSD is a bone scan. There have been reports of RSD that did not show up in a bone scan, but for me, the bone scan is what solidified the diagnosis.

Since seventh grade, the RSD has appeared, disappeared, and reappeared in my body, either due to an injury or not. I’ve been referred to as “the mystery case” because my RSD case is not a “by-the-books” situation. I’ve had RSD appear (at different times) throughout my body: ankle, leg, hip, arm, and wrist. The most recent flare-up, both legs and ankles, was spring of 2014. What do all of these locations have in common? They’re all limbs/appendages. That is another common identifying factor of RSD. It most often happens in a limb and occurs more often in girls than boys.

There is no cure for RSD. Mainly it’s pain medications and physical (and sometimes occupational) therapy. Physical therapy for an RSD patient requires a “re-training” of the brain. I’ve completed many, many sessions of PT at Ranken-Jordan Pediatric Bridge Hospital as an outpatient. Many of the sessions at Ranken left me in tears because of the amount of pain it caused me. The therapists were determined to teach my brain that stepping on a “broken ankle” (that isn’t really broken) doesn’t hurt me at all. As one can imagine, it took a long time for my brain to learn, but eventually, it did. Today, I am completely pain free and couldn’t be happier.

I’m going to wrap this up shortly so thank you to those still reading! This was my insight as to how my brain got stuck and didn’t act like a normal brain regarding pain, but was still able to perform all other functions correctly. Luckily, for myself, my RSD has disappeared and I hope every day that it never returns. For some, RSD will forever remain a permanent part of their lives. I can define RSD any time any way, but RSD will never define me. If you would like to read more about it, honestly, go to Google and type CRPS, RSD, Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome, or Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy. You will get a bit more of a scientific explanation. Thanks for reading!