At some point while we weren't looking ...

Those of you who've been following this blog for a while will remember that Samantha, at around the age of 5, began to suffer severe pain in her left knee. The kind of pain that woke her up at night, every night, literally screaming. For months on end.

You might remember the postings about Tylenol and Motrin, about waking her up at 3 am to get another dose of medicine into her before the first dose wore off, about a year of sleep deprivation for all of us, and about Samantha becoming so consumed by the ever-present threat of pain in her knee that she became afraid to participate in her usual physical activities.

You might remember the visits to pediatricians and orthopedists and neurologists, the x-rays and CT scans and MRIs, none of which shed any light on the source of her pain. Then there were the accupressure treatments, the pain management counseling, the rounds of trial-and-error with different medications, and finally the decision back in August of 2007 to treat this as some sort of inflammatory problem and put her on a moderate dose of naproxen, which finally provided real and lasting relief from the pain and allowed Samantha to resume a normal life and normal activities. It was like the weight of the world had been lifted from all of us.

After 18 months on naproxen Samantha was getting awfully tired of taking the stuff. She hates the taste (it's a liquid suspension) and I think she just doesn't like being dependent on it. We'd titrated the dosage down over time from 5 ml twice a day down to just 4 ml once a day, and she seemed to be doing fine. Truthfully, there were also a few days here and there when Sam would fall asleep early or something else would be going on that would cause us to miss a dose, and Sam still seemed to be doing fine.

So we made a decision that since this was school vacation week, we'd try taking Samantha off naproxen entirely for a while and see how that went.

It's been 10 days now and Sam is fine. No medication and no pain. I've checked with the neurologist and any naproxen that Samanthan had in her system would have metabolized out long since, so her pain-free state really is pain-free without medication. I think we've finally seen the end of naproxen.

The orthopedist told us that although there was no conclusive cause for Samantha's pain, it was possible that she would eventually outgrow it. Damned if he wasn't right.