It’s been just over two weeks since the injections, and as expected, I’m in a whole lotta pain. It’s like plate tectonics: one thing has moved, and the other parts are absolutely freaking out. It’s unpleasant nostalgia, as this is a concentrated version of the initial presentation of many of my symptoms. This time capsule of pain sent from my 13 year old self includes:

• intense burning in my upper back
• deep soreness through the left wrist
• left arm weakness
• hypersensitivity on the underside of the left arm

I’m playing 20-45 minutes most days, mostly with students, and cello definitely makes it orders of magnitude worse. Dr. Brown is on vacation, so I’ll try to talk to him next week to determine next steps. My instinct is that my back could use more Botox, and that things are still out of place. Keep in mind that this is not “trigger point therapy”, which, according to the most robust literature available, is not really helped by botulinum toxin at all. This may be because the injections are too imprecise, or that maybe a trigger point is not what we think it is, so the mechanism isn’t affected by paralysis. Say what you will about western medicine, but the science on soft tissue chronic pain is woefully thin. Anyway, the course of therapy I’m on is about putting structures back where they belong, so they can do the job they were designed to do.

In some later post, maybe a whole lot later, I’ll talk about the way exposure to trauma can influence injuries and prevent healing. That’s a deep well, and I’m not quite ready to ride down to the bottom of it yet.