This week has been another spent as a cyborg, but not in the way I’d mentioned in my previous post.

When I had my last stimulator installed they told me that there wasn’t anything they could do for the front of my head where 70% of my pain is. Turns out my amazing surgeon did his homework, and this week I got a supraorbital installation of the stimulator. What does that mean? It means this week they wired my eyebrow like a Christmas tree.

This procedure was very similar to the last one. Same type of device and setup, just a new location. This surgery had a few drawbacks.

First was I had to be awake for the entire procedure. I only call this a drawback because of the fact that I could feel almost everything, since they can’t do a lot of freezing in order to know where to place things. At one point I couldn’t help but chuckle. I felt the surgeon pull my eyebrow up and didn’t think anything of it (I’m completely draped and couldn’t see anything). It wasn’t until I heard him ask “Uh, Donna, are you lifting your eyebrow?” that I realized that neither of us were moving my eyebrow. Turns out if the leads move out of place it can leave you looking a little shocked.

The second drawback was post op. I had to deal with a bit of post op swelling, which stung and made it a bit hard to sleep. I’m not usually overly concerned with the cosmetic aspect of things. If it gets rid of this damned headache I’d shave my whole head. What stuck with me though in my sleepy state after surgery was my step-dad ever so lovingly asking me if I’d always have the Klingon brows. Thankfully the cleared up by day 4.

As for pain relief, it’s been incredible! The regular portions of my forehead impacted by the pain are numb when the stimulator is on. The true test was for me to cause a spike in my pain.  Those who know me know that my triggers are widely varied and generally weird. My food triggers include gluten, sugar and soy. So I chose to do spike my pain in a delicious fashion: Hintonburger, onion rings, and a chocolate milkshake. Not going to lie, that hurt, but it hurt for a few reasons.

The first was that the stimulator still can’t reach the top of my head and that is one of my pain points. Usually by increasing the amperage of the device using my remote control I  could expand the field of numbness, however with this location increasing it too high causes a good deal of pain to the eyebrow. I also don’t have anything treating the pain in the back of my head during this trial. The other reason I say it hurt wasn’t because of my head. It’s because I was so eager to eat that I forgot that introducing that much gluten and dairy to a body that has barely had any in 2 years is probably not a good call. My stomach and I were not on talking terms for a while after that.

Despite the fact that my pain levels still went up, it only climbed up to about a 5 of 10, and that’s including post op pain. Usually I’d be blind with pain, spiking to an 8 and being in dire need to drugs. It’s a vast improvement over what I’m like without the installation. Because of the post op incision pain I had a hard time assessing the benefit of the day to day pain, but by day 5 of the trial it was pretty clear that the improvement was significant with about an 80% reduction in pain.

The reactions to my wires were as hilarious as always. Most people seemed to think I’d had my head smashed in. Eventually instead of explaining it to everyone I just told them it was wires and “think seven of nine”. My favorite reaction was when I was coming home from the surgery and the anesthesia made me nauseous. Mom pulled over into a driveway to let me get some air. Unfortunately we were blocking residents from getting in and they looked mildly annoyed. That is until I looked up and they saw blood pouring down my face and I asked them for a Kleenex.

Today is the end of my trial and I went back to the hospital and had my device removed. I managed to get a picture of it this time.

It didn’t take long for me to start missing the device. Within minutes of it being pulled my headache was back at full force and making me curse the existence of florescent lighting in hospitals.

My surgeon came in and we talked about options. He’s still working on research, and it never ceases to amaze me how much work he does looking for ways to improve and change this procedure.

Leads are out leaving only a small hole. Had some great company at the hospital 🙂

The trials are done and we’re on to the final frontier. Next step is a permanent install of both the device in the back of my head, and the eyebrow. The battery will go under my collar bone to avoid too much tugging of wires, and to bury the wires they’re going to have to do interval incisions in my hair along the side of my head, so it looks like I’m keeping the shaved head look for a while.

There are risks, as with any surgery. Lead migration (with a side effect of clown eyebrows if it hits muscle again), infection, the usual. I’ll have to go back in to have my battery replaced every 3-5 years, and I’m going to have issues with electromagnetic fields and the TSA. But is it worth it?

Hell yes.