THE AGONY

What does it mean to have RSD/CRPS?

 Just picture yourself-one day, minding your own business, tending to your yard, chores, household chores, maybe, and you are hanging a photograph, and wham, the hammer connects with your finger instead of your nail in the wall.  Perhaps you yell out and cuss, and maybe are able to consider moving throughout your day, despite the ever increasing crescendo of pain that is building in your thumb, then the next day, it turns into a sharp, burning pain, and you can't handle concentrating on your job even because the wicked burning pain, and now swelling.

Then you notice that the hand you hit with the hammer with is competing with everything you do for your attention, and you feel sick.  Unbeknownst to you, a change has taken hold within your body.  A well-meaning doctor sees the now almost deformed hand, puffed out with swelling and gives you a prescription for 800mg ibuprofen threee times a day, and perhaps about 15 tablets of 5mg oxycodone "take 1-2 every 6-8 hours PRN.  You struggle to stagger the two: but your pain spirals continually out of control, and in 2-3 days, the oxycodone is gone, and you are back at the doctor, but now your hand is two more times the size it was, purple, cold to the doctor's touch, but you feel like it's on fire!!!

Welcome to CRPS/RSD (Complex Regional Pain Syndrome/ formerly known as Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy).

The only predictibility about it is the unpredictibility.

But in ONE YEAR; this is was RSD did to me: full circle: