The second night I was home, I was awoken in the middle of the night by extreme pain at my incision site. I sit there a minute to try to figure out what in the world just happened. I figure out that I had my purple fuzzy blanket snuggled up around my neck. This blanket is extremely soft and cozy. I think that my incision site must just be really sore and that my blanket just really aggravated it.
At the time, I didn’t know anything about CRPS. And I certainly didn’t know that I had CRPS. One of the symptoms of CRPS is Allodynia. This was my first experience with Allodynia, but it definitely wasn’t my last! Allodynia is the sensation of pain from something that doesn’t typically cause pain such as light touch, wind, bumps in the road or vibrations to name a few (from my experience). As long as I can remember, I’ve always slept with a blanket pulled up on my neck by my chin. I love the soft, fuzzy feeling of this purple fuzzy blanket so much, it’s my favorite! To this day, I still wake up in the middle of the night in excruciating pain from pulling my blankets up too far in my sleep. I’m not sure if I’ll ever quit doing this, it’s just a habit of mine. But this habit that I have is really interfering with my sleep! I’ll go into further detail later but I have had to cut my hair off, alter the clothing I wear, change the way I hug those close to me, including my daughter, in order to avoid this sensation. Allodynia is no joke, but I haven’t found that anything that comes along with CRPS is.
