The absurdity of my current situation here in inpatient rehab is difficult to overstate.

I am in dire need of an epidural steroid injection to see if we can get the disc herniation that is causing all of my current issues under control. This is the more conservative approach to the problem that will ideally allow me to avoid surgery. I don’t have another surgery recovery in me this year.

The inflammation and mayhem that is being caused by this renegade disc has put my MS symptoms into overdrive. My baclofen pump can’t keep up. The spasticity in my lower extremities is so severe that I am having trouble walking at all. I’m getting really good at wheelchair navigation – but that’s not the point of me being here at all. It’s just a rather handy side effect.

We keep adjusting my pump to try and get my muscle tone under control but the disc situation is making it hard to know if we’re going to go too far too fast. If the disc calms down after all of these massive dose increases on my pump, I might turn into a floppy squid. There’s no way to know.

So ideally, we should do the injection, see how it works and then readjust my pump while I’m still safely inpatient and monitored. But nobody will agree to do the injection in the actual hospital. The only way they will do this injection is on an outpatient basis. This means I’m going to have to be discharged to get the injection. If it works, I’m going to have to get back to the doctor to get my pump readjusted as an outpatient…and we all know how easy that is to do when one can’t use one’s legs so well.

In essence, I have to be discharged as an inpatient in order to get the injection which is the treatment for the diagnosis for which I am currently admitted. How does that make any sense at all?

It doesn’t.

Poor Dr. Franz has been going around and around in circles trying to get someone to see the absurdity of this situation. He told me today that he has hit a brick wall. I’m going to have to stay here a bit longer to keep trying to get my legs working while I’m also in intense pain almost all of the time, knowing that after my outpatient injection procedure, I will probably be back to MS spasticity mayhem but this time while I’m home and unable to use a wheelchair or have onsite assistance to make sure I don’t hurt myself.

I’m not even sure what to say about this but it’s so messed up it almost seems impossible. I want to call someone. Write a nasty letter maybe? But to whom? It’s quite literally maddening.

So yeh. That’s really dumb. I thought you should know.