I did it!
I didn’t chicken out (although I came REALLY close) and got my steroid shot in my neck yesterday!
It’s been a long journey with my neck pain and I finally took the next step. After multiple Xrays, doctors visits and an MRI, I was told I needed to have a selective nerve root injection in my C8 nerve to help with the pain I’m having from my degenerative disc disease and bulging discs.
For the past 24 hours I’ve gone into freak out mode. My not so brilliant butt decided to do some of my own research on youtube the night before my procedure. After seeing videos of the shot, I could barely sleep and told myself I would cancel it in the morning.
Well I woke up yesterday the morning and posted a few things on my Facebook page and soon realized I just needed to tough it out. (Thanks to all of you who told me to just do it!)
I headed to Goodman & Campbell Brain and Spine for the procedure. It has been such a great office with excellent employees and doctors. Everyone makes you feel so comfortable and they are so easy to talk to.
The C8 nerve is what is being affected in my neck because of my bulging disc. It’s the bottom yellow nerve on the left side of the creepy looking spine above.
It’s what causes the sharp pain, tingling and burning that’s near my left shoulder blade. It hurts the most when I do certain things like driving long distances, looking down for a while (school tests were the WORST) and doing overhead movements.
I hate waiting rooms. Why do doctors offices always make you sit so long in the waiting room? It’s always dead silent and just allows you to become more anxious while you wait for that doctor knock on the door.
Or you could be like me and start playing around with all the creepy neck sculptures…
The doctor finally came in and took me to the procedure room. At that point I was just ready to get the show on the road.
I had to lay down on my back while they draped a bunch of sterile clothes over my neck and face. At that point I couldn’t see much which is a good thing. No one wants to see needles before they go in their body!
They then rolled a big x-ray machine over me so the doctor could see inside my neck while he was doing the injection.
They sterilized my neck and then stuck in the first needle. It felt like a bee sting..in the front of my neck. To be honest, it hurt! They injected me with some numbing medicine first, then stuck in some iodine type stuff so they could see the nerves better in the x-ray. At that point they then shot in the steroids (Kenalog) and I could feel it go down my shoulder and arm. EEEK!
I’m usually pretty good with pain but this one made me squirm and tense up. Ouch.
Thankfully the whole procedure took only about 2 minutes. I’m not sure I could have handed it if it was longer than that!
Then I got a sweet band-aid which made it look like I cut myself shaving haha.
My entire left arm was numb. It felt like I had fallen asleep on it and it was dead weight.
The nurse handed me a follow up paper and when I tried to reach out and grab it with my left arm, I completely misjudged it and grabbed way above it. LOL. The joys of not feeling my whole arm 🙂 We all had a good laugh at that one.
Then I got into the car and put on my sunglasses and to my surprise, jacked myself in the face with my own hand. You know that feeling when your hand is numb and you have no control over it when you try to do something normal? Yep that’s what happened and I took a punch to the face haha.
What a dummy I am.
The numbness wore off in about 2 hours and then I was just a little sore from the shot. I took it easy for the rest of the night.
When I woke up this morning I wasn’t sore from the shot anymore and my pain in my back / neck was back to what it originally was. I was back to work in the morning.
The doctors said the steroids will take about a week to start to kick in so I’m hoping it’s only going to get better from here!
I’m just proud of myself for taking this next step and sticking with this procedure even when I really wanted to back out.
Now let’s hope it works. Fingers crossed!!!!
