Advice please , never ending pain.

[mama.c]

My son who lives in Thailand has a C4-C7 spinal injury after being involved in a motorbike accident (8weeks ago )
The effect of his SPI initially left him with no feeling or movement of his left arm,unable to support his head or feel the left side of his neck.His right arm is weak but he can move it and it has feeling.
After a couple of weeks of bed rest he  began daily physiotherapy.
He tells me that although there is still no movement ,he now can feel such deep pain in his left arm and he describes it as though dogs are biting at his fingers, no painkillers stop this pain .Is this part of the healing process (could the nerves be repairing ).We would be grateful for any advice please.

                                 A very worried Mum

[Andy]

hi mama.c

welcome to the forums and sorry to hear of your sons injuries, it sounds like his injury is 'incomplete' meaning there may be some more recovery.  Its such a vast subject and everyones injury is different , please see the links to 'fact sheets' and 'spinal injury' at the very top of forum pages [menu]

Andy

[mama.c]

Thanks Andy,  i really appreciate your reply, as you can imagine trying to find out about my son's condition from the hospital ,an awful lot is lost in the translation.But at least now i can learn more about the meaning of incomplete spinal injury.
                                                      Thanks Again

[cate]

Hi Mama c. welcome to the site. I hope we can give you some support,  Must be very difficult for  you, with him so far away.  My daughter is c5-c6, incomplete,  but every case is different.
Cate

[Janet]

I'm C4/5 C5/6 incomplete.  I recognise the symptoms you speak of.  After I had surgery I just didnt know where to put myself.  Eventually that chronic pain went but I was left with those symptoms in my fingers. It got better after a while and for a number of years I didnt use the fingers where I still had that burning irritating pain on the tips of my fingers.  My surgeon told me that normally he would have given me 9 months to improve but he thought the damage had existed for 30 yrs so he doubled the recovery time.  Pain relief is all your son can have I think but pain relief has improved and he may get something I didnt.  I only got Amitryptilene(sp) which, because its a drug mainly for depressives is given to ease neuro pain it raises the pain threshold sufficiently AND more importantly doesnt bind up the bowel as other pain remedies do.  Now I have Fentanyl patches which is a classified drug which I would have thought your son ought to be able to get even in low doses to ease things for him.  Tell him to hang in there because there may be room for improvement.
Hope this helps.
Janet