Hope for Jonathan

My brother and I spent our childhood playing sports together—soccer, badminton, squash, golf, running. You name it, we played it. Friends would talk to us about the latest TV shows and trends but we would mostly return a puzzled face. Why would we be indoors when there were the endless North Shore mountains extending for far as the eye could see? And then July 6, 2014 happened. I can still remember the message from my mother telling me that Jonathan had been in a collision with another soccer player. That night he was discharged from the emergency room; we were all shaken but the doctors assured us he would recover within 2 weeks. Almost 4 years later, Jonathan hasn’t had a single moment of reprieve from pain. Pain to stand. Pain to sit. Pain to lie down. Pain to breathe. Pain to exist. A chronic back and neck pain so perverse that it has left him physically disabled.

Jonathan has done CT scans and MRIs. He has gone through countless chiropractors, physiotherapists, neurologists, massage therapists, psychologists, and acupuncturists. He has tried numerous opioid pain medications, BioFlex cold laser therapy, NUCCA chiropractic adjustments, facet joint injections, trigger point injections, iSites (complex pain injections performed under ultrasound imaging), medical cannabis and lidocaine infusions. So far, none of them have provided any noticeable pain relief (with some even increasing his pain) and we still don’t know what is causing the pain. Some of the earlier, less invasive treatments were covered by MSP. But these treatments have failed and Jonathan’s last hope lies with more advanced, experimental, private pay treatments. Unfortunately, these treatments are expensive—the first IV lidocaine infusion was $1,400 and follow-up SQ lidocaine infusions range from $450-$600 (depending on dosage). He has had one IV and 3 SQ infusions but with no improvement. Prolotherapy is now recommended for him, which costs $400 for an initial assessment and $800 for each spine prolotherapy treatment (per area). Most people need an assessment plus 4-8 treatments per area. Jonathan has had the assessment and is currently booked for 5 spine treatments.

Chronic pain to the level my brother experiences is very rare in young people. I will never forget the look on my brother’s face after one of his sessions at a pain clinic. They had told the patients there is no cure for chronic pain and that the best way to move forward is “to accept that you have lived a good life”. Jonathan was injured at age 24. He had just graduated from university and was starting his career. But now he has no job and an ever-growing stack of medical bills. All that he looks forward to when he wakes up in the morning is pain. And pain the day after—a never ending greyscale existence of pain extending before him. But just because there is minimal research in a certain branch of medicine that does not mean there is no hope. We are hoping that prolotherapy will help ease Jonathan’s pain enough so that he can start the path to recovery. But if not prolotherapy, we will try the next medical procedure, and the next one, and the procedure after that one until the day I can take a walk with my brother not because he needs to see a doctor, but because we feel like it.