Thursday, February 16, 2012

A real jaw breaker

Hello! TIGF right? My school is having a half day tomorrow so that's pretty exciting! Lately I've been having a lot of arthritis pain in my jaw. The pain has been going on for a little over a year now without improvement which is a little discouraging. Over this past year I've had two steroid injections in the joint which required me to go under anesthesia and were extremely painful. The injections haven't seemed to help though so I recently went through iontophoresis therapy. The picture above is what the patches I had to put on my jaw for the therapy look like. Basically in this therapy the patch uses negatively charged ions to bombard the joint, in my case the jaw, with medication, for me they used dexamethasone which is a corticosteroid used for its anti-inflammatory effects. I finished this treatment about two weeks ago and the therapy hasn't seemed to help. Today I e-mailed my rheumatologist to tell her I am still in excruciating pain to which she replied that she would be ordering yet another MRI (this makes four on my jaw) and referring me to the University of Pennsylvania. Hopefully they know what to do to help this pain I'll be keeping you all updated. Have a great weekend!

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