Can Arachnoiditis be caused by multiple attempts of epidural from labor?

hello christina,

thank you , thankyou, thank you for your well wishes. we do have an awaful lot in common. i dont have a lot of pain in my upper body, just one shoulder in paticular...but in saying that i dont know if i have ever told a doctor about that shoulder because it is soooo minute compred to my back. here lately (even before the surgery) it just feels as if it is literally broken, with every step and on "bad days" it hurts no matter what,
you cant stop trying to find a doctor, if for nothing else your sanity. and i have always been a believer that if you have been wronged you should be compensated. why is it that you think you only have 8 months left....have you been diagnosed with anyhting that the docs say is caused from the epidural. thats the first step then states have different statutes but most dont start until you recieve info of being hurt by the epi. just make sure that you get a reputable atty. and know that it will be many years before an offer is made...this is how my lawyer explained it to me. when i met with an atty he went over everything, including all my medical records and he said that he found many breaches un care at the hosp. but that without a diagnosis we couldnt sue. he put it to me this way....you have a big case once you get a diag and if that diag could have been caused by the breaches in care from the hosp. thats my main problem with the lawsuit, no doc will even give me a dx or even try to figure it out . its like when i go to one doc they just send me to another one and when i come back the only thing they can say is " well what did the other doc say" this has lead to my dislike and distrust in the medical proffesion.
but dont give up hope, even if the only hope we have is that it stops getting worse. also do you keep a pain diary? i find that it helps keep me sane...and when i have a good day i try to look back and see what could have made a difference.
well i hope that your pain gets better, and yes the one thing i have found out is make your payments to the doctors that you cant afford to not have. i know its hard but try to work something out with them
indiana mama

i just realized that i have not been signing in when i leave a post...so for all of those who are reading this some of my post are not listed as indiana mama, but except for 3 comments from this point i was posting the rest...thanks and sorry for any confusion

oh my i forgot to mention that since i discon. the baclofen and the neurontin and the cymbalta ...things just got worse not better the waya that the world famous cleveland clinic was so sure of. i will say that my brain doesn't feel as much in a fog and memory has improved but nothing else. and for the things that have gotton worse...muscle spasms even more often. more burning pain in my hips and legs and newly in my feet. i did get put on lamictal for my depression and mood swings...lol my husband likes it it seems to control my mood at least. my rheumo doesnt know hwat to think...with only mildly posistive ana ...she has done other test that confirm an autoimmune component but which one evades her...and after 1 year trying to figure it out she's moving gotta go to another one now.
i am giving the surgery until one month post opp before going to every doctor i currently have and drilling them for answers. also i would like to mention that just for the skeptics..i only have my PCP give me any pain meds i would never want any new doctor to think i am coming to them for meds. i am lucky that my pcp seems to be the only one who really cares, that is probley cause she knew me before my labor and she has seen me in tears since then.

thanks for the response and kind words. to the first, yes the surgery was to fix the only thing that has shown up on MRI. i should say that they could tell from the mri and confirmed with the surgery that no nerves were being impinged, there for i should only expect 60/40 odds of it working. but i was willing to take the risk i decided along with my family to trust the doc's and if they say that nothing is going on other than a degenerative disc (L5/S1)
to trust that they can fix it. this is soooo much worse now i cant even get up to go to the bathroom by my self. we went to the doctors 9 days post opp, the nurse took an xray we waited for him. when he came in he looked at the xray and only spoke to me for about 90 seconds. he daid the xray looked fine and reinterated that it was a 40 % failure rate and that no other surgeon would have attempted the surgery. funny he never mentioned that this wasn't normal before. then he left saying he would see me in 4 weeks. i am at a loss i think i am just going to go see a dr in alabama, when we can afford it ...lol kinda hard on short term dis. if anyone know s dr antonio aldrete would love to know if he is worth the money. thnaks for the site i will check it out

Indiana Mama,

I am so sorry that you are in such pain. You have been through so much in the last couple of years, and now having to have spinal fusion surgery -- and to have to heal in both front and back -- is so much to deal with. I wish I could send you a hug and some more pain medicine.

Hang in there -- you had major, major surgery and it can take new moms two weeks to just start healing from a C-section. I am hoping that as the abdominal muscles start to heal, your pain will start to retreat.

I have a question for you -- what exactly was the point of the spinal fusion? Was it to take care of the slightly herniated/prolapsed disc you wrote about before?

You may have found this web site on your own, but I wanted to point it out to you. It's about postop care for spinal fusion patients and what they can expect in terms of recovery:

http://www.spine-health.com/treatment/spinal-fusion/postoperative-care-spinal-fusion-surgery

Do you have a post-op appointment scheduled with your doctor?

so it has been a couple of months since i wrote on here but here goes...as of today i am 1 week post -op from spinal fusion. and it has been horrible and trying to cope is even worse than before. i had expected to be in more pain while in the hosp. but when they released me i thought it would then be in less pain over the next couple of days..well the exact opposite. if i thought i couldn't live with the pain before i wouldn't understand how to if this becomes permanent OMG that is even too much to visualize. the surgeon said everything went well durring surgery and now we just need me to heal...oh yeah he did an anterior (stomach) approach, it looks more like a c-section. no matter what happens i would not reccomend this just because of the pain. i mean how much sense does it make to have your back in more pain from the inflammation and brusing of surgery THEN to add the horrible pain of slicing all your abdominal muscles. another thing i dont understand is that he sent me home with a presription of lortab 5.( the minimum) but during my 6 day hosp stay he had put me on oxycodone 10..2 pills every 4 hours which is a huge dose ( that is 3 times the amount i would use before the surgery...this is just perplexing that he would cut it down so much when my pain level hasnt come down much since then but also because i had the best results with the oxycodone for the past 8 months but i agree that this surgery was to get out of pain because i didnt want to be on meds the rest of life. i also asked the surgeon to see if he say anything that could have been caused from the epidural that could have been adding to my pain. when i came ot he basicly told me that he didnt go up high enough and that (in not so many words) basicly his reasons for the surgery had been accomplished. the only thing i was hoping is for him to find nothing so i could get this arachnoiditis thing out of my head. well any comments would be appreciated
indiana mama

so the update is that they now think that all the medications i have been put on since the back pain started has now caused some reversable side effects mainly the neurological ones, the main goal is to get me off the neurontin, baclofen and oxycodone and put on new meds that wont have the adverse reactions. however they could not explain the reason as to why i had the inflamaotory response in my csf. and as naturally to be expected they blamed some of my pain to an over exaggerated state and on depression....naturally i disagree. what i do know is that i hope when i get off this medication the nurological problems do go away so then we can work on the root problem the chronic back pain that radiates throughout the lower half. they want me to go to this functional restoration center in columbus for 3-6 weeks . not sure if it will be what we ultimatley decide, i am hopeing that something comes up closer to here, home. but i am committed to overcome what ever the hell this is . and i am willing to try anything.
please let me know if anyone has heard of these interdiciplnary funtional restoration programs...not sure what to expect

sorry i forgot to mention that my blood inflamation was normal limits but they found it in my cfs