Congratulations, Marci, on finding some relief...less pain is good, extremely less pain is extremely good. Hopefully whatever side effects there are will be easier to live with than the pain. Here's to a painless or at least a less pain future.
Adrienne, like so many aspects of the whole AN journey, it's in the individual details. One value I found in this forum post-diagnosis and pre-surgery was to get an idea of the realm of possible solutions for things that could come up. After being told on the phone while at work that I had a "growth on the acoustic nerve and would be contacted by a surgeon that deals with those", I stopped at Barnes and Noble and picke up a small moleskin notebook. As I moved through the research, I wrote info in that. I found I needed to limit miyself to 30 minutes a day of research and if I thought of something at another time I would take a note in my PDA.
When I ran across a discussion like this on on this forum I would make a note: nerve pain - possible medication: Lyrica, Cymbalta Then if that thing did occur, I had a base to start the research on that aspect. I was very fortunate in that most of the possible complications I noted down..I ended up not having to deal with in my case.
It might not work for everyone but it certainly helped this very left oriented brain get through it.
Oh yeah, there are no ignorant questions. Not a single person on here was born with any knowledge about AN's. We were all thrown into the deep end of the knowledge pool by that phone call or MRI results appointment. It's a deep pool and just like trying to get off the bottom of a real pool, we had to claw our way back to sanity one question, one internet search, one support group meeting at a time.
..take care.. tim b
