Learning to Cope with CRPS RSD by Karen Rodham

Author:Karen Rodham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers

STELLA

‘So, I treated it almost like a project. She [the physiotherapist] said four times a day so four times a day, whatever I was doing, I would stop and do these exercises. And my eyes would be streaming because it was so painful. But it worked, you know. It worked.’

Stella was 65 years old and had been diagnosed for three years at the time of the interview. She had had CRPS in her left arm, but felt that her CRPS had largely resolved. Her CRPS had started when she broke her elbow and was put into a plaster cast from her shoulder down to her fingers:

I had this terrible panic because I could feel my arm was swelling and I, I think that might have been the start of it. And it was like my arm was swelling. That’s a nuisance, it’s [the cast], it has got to come off now. And it felt claustrophobic, I have terrible claustrophobia and it felt like my arm was getting claustrophobia. And I literally had to go to A&E and the time I was waiting, in my head I was panicking so much. And whether that was the start of it, erm, I don’t know.

Stella also had what she described as ‘blue sausage, huge blue fingers’ and although she talked to the nurses in A&E about this, she said that they had no idea what was causing the problem other than assuming it was linked directly to her broken elbow. She described having a number of follow-up appointments. At the third appointment a potential diagnosis was offered, but the way in which the information was delivered was incredibly insensitive and unhelpful:

And then on the third appointment the doctor said (I was furious with them afterwards), ‘Watch those fingers it might be…’ and then he rattled off a phrase that didn’t mean a thing to me and said, ‘You need physio for that,’ and that was all that was said.

Later in the interview, she said that she had returned to the original doctor and had tried to tell him that she wished he had explained CRPS more clearly to her when he had first mentioned it as a possibility:

I said, ‘You said, you know ’cos I’ve now found out why I’ve got these blue fingers and you should have explained it to me,’ erm, and he looked at his notes and said, ‘Look, I’ve written I’ve given a full and thorough explanation of CRPS to this patient’ or something. I said, ‘You didn’t say ten words, watch those fingers, you might have Complex Regional Pain Syndrome,’ and I said that wasn’t good enough. I was so upset I was in floods of tears. He did apologize, but if he’d just said, ‘Oh, I’ve just noticed your fingers’ […] erm, I think that would have cut through all the nonsense I went through afterwards trying to find out about it.

This highlights the importance of health professionals checking their patients’ understanding of the information they have been given.

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