Kellye,

My son at first did land therapy and the therapists constantly hurt him.  The problem was that he was able to do the exercises at the time but later he would be in agony all night and sometimes for as much as a week.  He stopped doing it because all they did was hurt him.  Then he started hydrotherapy and got a wonderful therapist who let him do as much as he was able to do.  Hydrotherapy has been really good and I recommend it.  The therapist also massaged his legs at cetain tigger points and he thinks this made a tremendous difference bc his pain level went down.  She has been on vacation for 3 weeks and his pain level is up again.  We are going today and hopefully she will be there and we can test the therory that her massaging makes a big difference.  As for PT's here in New York, I think they are taught "no pain, no gain" but if they read up a bit on chronic pain they would soon discover that it does not work for chronic pain and actually worsens it.  So, see whether you can do hydro-therapy.  It is difficult to find a pool which is heated to at least 92 degrees.

As for the SCS, my son had one put in and it did not work and he had it taken out.  The operation caused incredible pain - much more than we had anticipated and the control pack put in his buttock caused him pain down his left leg for the whole time he had it in.  So, it was a tremendous amount of extra pain with no benefit (the trial worked very well).  But, we met someone and read stories from others whose pain was reduced dramatically with a SCS.  So, you cannot know what will happen.  Apparently, it is very rare that the trial works and the permanent one does not so you could try the temporary one which is not a big deal and see how it goes.  BTW, we were very unimpressed with the Medtronic reps who do the programming of the SCS.  They could not make the trial one work, it was our pain management doctor who did that.   Linda