Day 278

ER Once Again...
For the past three weeks Sarah has been having a continual increase in pain due to the nerves in her chest and arm waking back up in the aftermath of her double mastectomy surgery. What her pain feels like is when your leg falls asleep and feels like pins and needles when you move or touch it , but x100. Every time she moves or touches her chest it is excruciating.

We finally got Sarah in to the pain clinic at SCCA and they put her on a new regiment of medication that will get this new pain under control. However, this new regiment will take 3-5 days to start to make a difference and probably 1-2 weeks to completely control the pain. To give you an idea of how resistent Sarah is to medication, the pain clinic had her try a pain medication that was 50x stronger than morphine and it had no effect on her at all.

Last night we were on our way back from picking up the new medications when Sarah's pain started to worsen. It was so bad that I made the decision to take her to emergency room. They kept giving her more and more pain medications but nothing helped. She was there for about six hours and her pain was not touched at all. By the time we made the decisionn to go home Sarah was in intense pain and was very frustrated by not getting any relief in the ER. We headed home and tried to go to bed. This morning Sarah's pain hadn't lessened, but the breakthrough shooting pains that sent her over the edge had ceased. She is feeling a little better and we are eager for her new pain control regiment to take full effect.

-Kirk