Vic – What’s your number-one day-to-day living problem?

Well unfortunately, and I think a lot people this happens with, I guess because of the type of injury I had in a car accident, and all the other type of injuries, I have a lot of pain.  And, unfortunately, it kind of seems like when you’re spinal-cord-injured—and I guess this happens to people that are able-bodied as well—but when you’re in pain, the doctors don’t handle that real well.  A lot of doctors just don’t know what to do with pain.  Usually pain’s caused by something, they fix it, it goes away.  Well I guess with this chronic pain that I’ve got, they don’t know how to make it go away.  And, we’ve tried several different things.  The type of pain, it’s kind of like, a band that goes around, it’s kind of this neuropathic pain, they don’t seem to have something that actually gets rid of it.  And I’ve tried different things.  I’ve been on everything from Hydrocodone, to OxyContin, to the Fentanyl patches.  But, I was doing the patches and some Hydrocodone together, and then, of course, you’re kind of a little foggy, and so that wasn’t good either.  So, I just ended up stopping the Hydrocodone, and just strictly doing the patches, and then the patches became completely, pretty much ineffective.  And, we’ve tried, we’ve gone through the surgery trying to implant maybe electrodes, we’ve tried to implant like a pain pump, and because of all the scar tissue and such, that’s not worked out.  And, that’s been very frustrating because, you know, there’s times I’ve said, you know, “I can deal with being in a wheelchair, but sometimes the pain is what really holds me back from doing things.”