Rick Largent - Dealing with Pain
from Lewiston Morning Tribune 6 Sep 2010
On a happy-face scale of zero to 10, Rick Largent said he has returned to the range of perpetual smiles.
“I was ready to kill myself”, Largent, 53, said of the pain he’d been suffering since a freak accident in November of 1995. “It got to the point where none of my friends would come around because all I did was cry about pain.”
While he’s still not pain-free, Largent, a quadriplegic, said the excruciating discomfort he’s experienced has been greatly alleviated- thanks to what he calls “miracle” spinal cord stimulation surgery he underwent nine months ago though the Washington Center for Pain Management in Seattle.
“Very successfully. Very successful,” he said, explaining that for years he had been spending his days at the high end of a point chart, where happy faces turn to grimaces and tears. I’d wake up to tears and go to bed with tears.” Now after doctors implanted a battery-powered electrical pulse generator under his arm with electrodes leading to the epidural space just outside his spinal canal where the injury happened, Largent said he’s looking forward to life again.
“The last five years have to be the worst,” Largent said. “The pain (which radiated up from his left testicle and seemed to consume his entire upper body) just wore and wore and wore on me...”. He said he contemplated suicide to the point of asking his in-home health care provider to put his pain pills up and away from his reach. He’d tried prescription drugs like Oxycontin, morphine, and Valium. Nerve blocks were unsuccessful. So was the implantation of an intrathecal pump to deliver Prialt, a drug made from the venom of sea snails. The only relief he had, Largent said was to smoke marijuana. “You feel like a criminal”, he said. "I had to hide to take a toke. I always kept it secret in my house, and it was horrible because it was the only thing that helped me. Right now, I don’t have any in the house. I don’t need any”. When people saw him smile in public, Largent said, it was because he was stoned and in a mental state of not caring about the pain, until the pot wore off and the pain returned.
Largent credits Betty Knight, a live-in caregiver who’s been at his side since 1996, for seeing him through the worst and now is enjoying the turnaround to the point of being able to take a sabbatical. "Betty needed a break”, said Largent, who has other people filling in to help him with daily needs. For the most part, he’s relegated to a wheelchair but is able to drive with a specially-equipped van and manages to interact with much of the world via the Internet. “I use my thumbs, and hope these fingers don’t get in the way”, he said of his keyboarding technique.
Despite the reduction in pain, Largent said he still laments the accident, mostly because it involved a playful father-son wrestling match that ended tragically. “My head hit the carpet”, Largent recalled rolling around on the floor with his son, Jason. “He rolled me easy, but I thought I was on an electrical cord. It shocked me, and I was screaming”. Largent landed in such a way that he crushed his spinal cord at the C5-6 location in his neck, apparently destroying enough motor nerves to leave him paralyzed, but leaving enough sensory nerves intact to transmit the sensation of pain.
The new implant, he explained, works by blocking transmission of the pain sensation. It’s far from complete, but vastly improved over the days when he cried to the point of being suicidal, Largent said. “I love people and I love to be around people”, Largent said, but there was a time when people didn’t want to be around me. That’s exactly right, and that hurt me quite a bit”.
Despite less physical pain in his life, Largent said he still grapples with what’s happened within his family. He was divorced before the accident, and about three years later, his biological daughter died of cancer. He remains estranged from his son, and pretty much from his other daughter. He said he hopes both will give him another chance to prove he’s a better person when not overcome by pain. I’m still not pain free, he said, and my life is still very challenging, but I can at least deal with it. Because of that, Largent said, he finds himself smiling more in the last few months than he has in nearly 15 years- sometimes to the point of being nearly off the happy-face chart.
The story told elsewhere
