I went to see a neurologist yesterday and he confimed that I had femoral nerve damage with involvement to all of my right leg. This neuro has practiced for a while and he told me that this was the first case of this kind that he has seen that occured from a surgery! He asked me if I had returned to see my othro. and I told him that certainly I had followed up with him and told him about the problem. Neuro. asked me what ortho. said and I told him that ortho, said nothing...but prescribed Elavil for the nerve ending pain and gave me pain medication. Pain now is constant with "striking" almost "electricity" like pain along with "burning". Trying to decide what my next move should be. Not sure. But I don't want to take this sort of medication for an extended period of time and neither Dr. could tell me if this is temporary or permanent. Thank you for your concern.

unfortunetly trying to tell at this point whther or not this is actually a temporary or permanent problem is kind of iffy at best.it can take up to a year for any damaged nerve to actually try and "heal" itself.some do,some don't but it will take some time to really see.

one thing you can do right now in order to see just what if any actual function is left in that nerve would be to have an EMG nerve conduction study done on it and the srrounding muscle to see what if anything is actually still flowing thru it to the muscles it innervates.this would at the very least tell you something that you do not already know regarding the extent of damage.

i would either speak with the ortho and tell him you really need to know just how much actual damage was done to your nerve during the surgery or you can speak with the neuro.either one can refer you to the place that can do this test.

unfortunetly as you are now finding out,actual nerve pain is extremely painful and also very hard to actually treat,the neuro is on the right track with the elavil but there are many other types of meds that can also be tried if that fails or the side effects from it get too bad.i took elavil before and it kind of turned me into a zombie all day even if i took it at night,the effects still would hang over the next day too.

hopefully the nerve will eventually die down in the intesnsity of the signals it is sending out and possibly even heal some,at least enough so you will not be feeling the actual effects anymore.but most definitely speak with one of your docs about the nerve conduction study and find out what you are actually dealing with right now as far as extent of damage and any muscle loss.some muscle loss cannot actually be felt or really detected til it starts to atrophy from the loss of nerve function to it.i do wish you luck.please let me know how things are going,K? FB