Me and my husband really need some help.

My husband is a 25 year old male 170 pounds 5 foot 10 inches. This all started on august 6th, my husband and I were driving home like normal and went to a friends house to eat dinner. He ended up complaining of neck pain which later turned into him vomiting that night. The next morning he woke up for work still in extreme pain and vomiting, he ended up getting sent home.

From that point forward he didn’t work for 1.5 months. He was in extreme pain I took him to the ER a total of 4 times begging for answers and IVs due to the constant vomit. We kept getting sent home after IV treatment. The Er ran the emergent tests, ruled out Meningitis, did a head and neck ct without contrast, and blood work for west Nile. We worked with his primary care doctor who prescribed lots of different pain meds (traMADol, gabapentin, Cymbalta, muscle relaxers) but none of these worked. He was eventually put on a 4 week course of steroids. The steroids were the only thing that worked he felt better the next day after taking them. Now he is off steroids and pain is coming back.

Later primary care told him to go to Physical therapy who said he doesn’t think there is anything he can do for him and told us to come back if anything changes. We eventually got a cervical spine mri without contrast which came back clean.

Then we went to a neurologist. Neurologist suspected a CSF leak and ordered mri of his whole spine with contrast. This is because when his pain was really bad before steroids he felt better laying down, pain worsened with sneezing, coughing and pooping. He spent most of his day laying down for any slight relief. The mri came back with these results C5-C6: Minimal dorsal bulging of disc material. The neuroforamina are patent. L5-S1: There is a posterior disc protrusion measuring 4.7 mm. There is 1.1 cm of inferior extrusion.

At the follow up appointment with Neurologist, he said that there is nothing wrong with the mri. I asked about the L5 but he said it was nothing. I feel like it’s not nothing? Should I bring mri results to his primary doctor ? He said it was possible he still has a CSF leak but it didn’t show on the MRI. He said we could look into possibly getting the blood patch blind and hope that fixes it. He also suggested Cervical dystonia, and did an exam. He said he is going to ask insurance about the Botox and try that to see if it fixes it. He asked us to start from the beginning again and asked if he had any other pain (told us to think of anything we can) I said he has had knee pain for almost a year, and for the past 2 years struggled with wrist pain and elbow pain that I used to take him to the chiropractor for. He has also had really bad lower back pain for the past year too, I thought the thing on the mri was because of it but he said it’s minimal which confused me ? He asked about rashes, I remembered when this first started he got a large rash on his back that looked like Petechiae. I also said sometimes his cheeks and nose get really red I’ve noticed after being outside but I assume sunburn. He said because steroids was the only thing that helped that we should talk to pcm about possible lupus or RA. I feel like it’s a shot in the dark?But he won’t be able to get tested for it for a few months due to him being on steroids for so long, could be a false negative.

He is now on a doctors note for work , not to lift more than 15 pounds, and hourly breaks to stretch/ sit etc until they figure out what’s going on. We are honestly so defeated. We saw the mri results on his chart online before the appointment and we assumed that the disc stuff was the reason for pains. So we got really saddened by him saying his mri was perfectly fine because we thought we had the answer finally. Insurance takes about 3 weeks to approve treatments so it’s taking them forever to rule out stuff. I am considering paying out of pocket for new testing. Should I bring up the mri to the primary care doctor or is it really nothing ? If anyone has any ideas of what this might be that would help a ton. I’m going to write it all down and bring it up to his primary care physician. I tried to research online but a lot of stuff is really overwhelming and confusing.