I currently have a spinal cord stimulator. The intention behind mine is to help with 3 major areas: nerve pain waist down, low back pain, and pudendal neuralgia.

First, I want to express that the trial was one of the best things to ever relieve these issues. I graded it at 85% relief of all 3 major areas. Granted, it's hard to distinguish the relief because you're going to be in pain from the procedure, but if you're used to the pain you have, you'll notice a difference.

Second, I've been a bit of a "problem case" since I healed enough from the permanent device implant and 2nd surgery to reposition the leads, so please consider other perspectives and experiences other than mine. Many people I know have had success with their devices, mine is a bit of a let down.

On that note, after healing enough (6 or so weeks) from the original permanent implant, and getting programmed, not only did the pain relief NOT equal what I'd had at the trial (65% relief on the nerve pain at the time, nothing for the rest), there was an extra side effect I was experiencing that took months of reprogramming - and that is that I had a weird stimulation that hit my ribs and made it difficult to breathe. It wasn't anything major, just made it a little uncomfortable, but it was enough to the point that every time I got reprogrammed, it took at least an hour to try to tweak it, but it never fully went away. I went through that process multiple times over the next months and they even called in an Engineer from Texas to help - to no avail. I was scheduled for a 2nd surgery to reposition the leads and started the whole process over again after recovery. Over this 2nd course of reprogramming, not only was the ribs thing still there, it was a bit worse AND I was getting a sharp pain in my mid back on certain things. So, it's not better, it's worse - but I'm at the point of "Ok, I guess if I don't want surgery again, I have to live with it like this..."

I am still in chronic pain, my nerve stuff isn't being relieved to the degree I would like, and neither of the other 2 problems are being relieved either. So basically, I consider this a fail - although having it taken out doesn't seem like a good plan either. I'm going a different route right now and have basically put the handling of this device and the unanswered "what do we do now?!" for my surgeon on hold. He doesn't seem to have an answer anyway, everyone is stumped as to what's wrong, why it isn't working right, why these other problems even exist... so yeah.

I'm sorry that my story sucks, but again, mine isn't the only one out there. I haven't met or spoken with anyone else that's had these issues, they've all been positive and helped people out tremendously. I highly recommend at least doing the trial and seeing for yourself if it will help or not.

Feel free to ask any questions, I'm open to answering what I can about my experience etc. 🙂