I got home from my first day of therapy at The Children’s Institute. The morning consisted mostly of assessments. I had a grilled chicken sandwich, fries plus a Klondike bar for lunch, which I burned through. It was kind of disturbing. I haven’t eaten that big a meal for lunch in a long time. (I find I get a lot of stomach trouble from the RND.) Some of the therapy was gruelling, I didn’t like the 6 min. jog/run and the inchworm animal walk was hard. Really, freaking hard. I did all of it though. The inchworm is where your bending over, hands flat on the floor and your feet touching the ground behind you, with your legs almost straight. Once you get in that position you move one hand forward and the next then one foot and the other. It was hard to cover any amount of ground because it was slow going. I like that my day (8am-4pm) ends with some hydrotherapy. They have 2 pools but the larger one’s pump is broken. It was a really lovely, albeit small therapy pool, nice and warm as well. While I was in pain doing the animal walks the only other thing that was a problem is the tightness in my back and shoulders. It is annoyingly achy.

After I got back from the hospital my brother, Mom and I went to Target. I scored a Star Trek (the original) and Wolverine t-shirt. Did you know that those pretty black and speckled white composition that I lust after in Canada and can’t find anywhere are only a 1.50$ here (Pittsburgh)? I love notebooks. Anyways, I also picked up a Flip UltraHD. OK, I’ll post more tomorrow, I can’t keep my eyes open.

I was diagnosed last month with a condition called RND. It has a lot of other names and many different forms. One of the other names I am familiar with is Pain Amplification Syndrome. When I’m talking to people I usually use both. Mostly because when I say Pain Amplification Syndrome, I feel like I just made up a name for my condition! PAS doesn’t sound very . . . real. I’ll be taking something of a break from blogging while I’m getting better. Although I may update here and there.

What is RND?

Pain is usually a response to tissue damage. This damage uses the pain nerve to send a signal to ones spinal cord, which in turn sends a signal to your brain which recognizes the signal of pain.

With my condition there is a short circuit in my spinal cord. The pain signal is not only sent to my brain, it’s also sent to some other nerves, the neurovascular ones to be exact. Those bad boys control blood flow but they’re a bit wimpy when it comes to these signals. They get all scared and decide to make the blood vessels to constrict. Think of it as a chain of bullying. Now, constricted blood vessels equals decreased blood flow. This means less oxygen everywhere and it leads to a build up of acids, both of these things cause more pain. At which point the whole process starts all over again.

I got the information I used to write this little blurb from this very helpful handout. It has a nice diagram too!
http://www.rsds.org/4/youth/pdf/AMP_RNDparentHandout.pdf