Tazered for my own good

Posted on August 4, 2010 in Neurology

Did he like doing it? The [[nerve conduction study]] made me wonder. The nurse, who wasn’t the nicest or most sympathetic person, looked me over . “What are you here for?” she asked. I said I didn’t know. She smiled as she read my chart and said “The nerve exam.”

I had been warned about this. One friend told me that it had been like snapping rubber bands against her legs. My physical therapist didn’t like remembering it at all. She’d been suffering from carpal tunnel and when they applied the electrodes to her arm, IT HURT.

The result for me was somewhere in between. My neurologist led me into a room with a little electric box and a panel festooned with wires and electrodes. He attached a large dark gray, square patch attached to a wire to the back of my hand and two small, round, black ones to the fleshy parts of my thumb. Then he revealed a bi-pronged tazer. I told him that I had heard about this.

“And what did they say?” I told him.

“Like being snapped with rubber bands, eh?”

He positioned the device over my wrist. “Now I am going to count to three and you’re going to feel a shock. One, two, three.” He touched the prongs to the skin. My flesh seemed to catastrophically shrivel and run away from the point of contact.

“Whoa!” I cried. “Do me a favor. No count to three this time. Just one.” I didn’t much care for the drama.

“One” he said and zap! Same sensation, higher up on the arm where he prodded me.

“That wasn’t as bad,” I said. I laughed and kept laughing through the rest of the procedure. It didn’t tickle. My chortles were akin to those I emitted when hitting a bump on a [[roller coaster]] ((Bipolar sufferers often compare their mood swings to a roller coaster. I’ve always thought the ride was more like a panic attack.)) . I was terrified out of my mind, but the laughter helped me recover from the shock.

“The first time is usually the worst,” he said. “You don’t know what to expect. And one!”

He zapped me maybe eight, maybe a dozen times up and down my arm. My hand jumped and half-clenched whenever he hit me.

“You don’t have problems in the neck, do you?”

“Um, no.” I was thankful for the limits of the dysfunction.

He removed the electrodes and produced a pair of medieval clamps. “This next part looks worse, but it’s not. The charge is going to be less.”

He fastened them around my index finger, then touched my hand and my arm a couple of times. At the very end, my hand was shaking from excitement. He zapped me, checked the feed on a tiny oscilloscope window. “You’ve got to relax.” I took a deep breath and went to my other place, which wasn’t far away but had no real character. Zap! The procedure was over.

“I won’t be using the needle because I have enough data to make a diagnosis.” There was a needle involved? I shoved away the ugly fantasies that came out of this revelation quickly, then described the movement problems I’d been having with the left hand ((Interesting. I talk about the left hand as something removed, distant. I bet if the right hand was involved, I’d be talking about my right hand.)) , especially the distal joint of the ring finger. He made out a requisition for x-rays of the hand and the left elbow.

The ulnar nerve was definitely damaged. Surgery was not yet advisable so I was to continue at physical therapy. An elbow brace ((I don’t see what it is doing for me, but I very carefully put it on this morning and typed with it on. I had some adjustment problems at first — I put it on backwards so I was cutting off the circulation, but a spin and some loosening of the straps holding it in place cured me of this.)) was to become part of my daily attire.

I had done very well, my neurologist said as The nurse looked a little disappointed as I checked out ((The main aftermath consisted of tiredness in the arm and faint soreness that lingers as I write this.)) . I smiled and moved on to my next appointment.