Got Stiffness and Pain? Me Too!

In my case, stiffness and pain are mostly caused by MS-related muscle spasticity and neuropathy. I’ll explain further.

Muscle spasticity

First, muscle spasticity. What is it? Simply put, it is stiffness due to a muscle contraction that doesn’t relax. It happens when there's disruption in communication from the brain and spinal cord to the muscles.^1,2

Whenever this happens to me, it’s a combination of good news and bad news. The good news is that spasticity increases muscle tone – read that as stiffness – which, when it happens to my leg muscles, helps me stand and walk. Great news so far!

The bad news is when the stiffness doesn’t relax and the muscles remain rigid. This can cause me to assume some very weird poses:

1. Spazzy prima donna: I might go up on my toes like a ballet dancer, lose my balance, and crash into a bookcase on my way down to the floor
2. Flamingo: one leg involuntarily tucks itself up until I am standing one-legged
3. Frankenchicken: unable to bend at the hips and knees, I lurch across the room like barnyard poultry

Cramping, pain, and more

What’s more, my sustained muscle stiffness has at times caused cramping, spasms, fatigue, pain, and other symptoms. I treat leg spasticity with baclofen (a muscle relaxer), stretching, heat, and a TENS unit.

I also have constant, one-sided hip spasticity that, my neurologists have told me, originates in the piriformis muscle. It is located deep in the butt muscle and may relax with stretching.³

Muscle cramping often starts in the calf and can travel down to my toes, causing them to twist painfully. I call this a Charlie horse. I can relieve it by bending my foot at a 90-degree angle and massaging all muscles below the knee. Thigh muscle massage helps, too.

After a painful cramp subsides, my entire leg can ache for hours. It can be very fatiguing. Sometimes I feel like napping.

Bladder issues, too

Less often, I might have a muscle spasm in my leg or arm. It is different from a cramp. A spasm is a jumpy muscle that doesn’t hurt. Less often still, I get an eye twitch, which is caused by a spasm in the face muscles.

Spasticity has affected other areas, too.

After my worst MS flare in 2009, not only did it create chronic leg spasticity, I was also left with a spastic bladder. It made me pee quite often and feel urgency long before my bladder was full. I treated it successfully with Vesicare for many years. The drug quieted my bladder, so I wasn’t running to the john every half hour. Ten years later, I didn’t need it anymore. For some reason, bladder spasticity didn’t last. Yay!

MS-related neuropathic pain

So that is basically how spasticity affects me. Now on to MS-related neuropathic pain.

Somewhere along the line, I began to feel four new sensations: numbness, electric shock zaps, bruising pain, and burning. Yikes! Weird. Weirder yet, I felt them all in both thighs, across the top and down the outer sides, in a mirror image. All at the same time! Double weird.

Fortunately, taking gabapentin three times a day completely keeps the electric shock and burning pain under control for me. Until recently, as of my writing this, it did nothing to control the bruise-like pain. But things have now improved. At this writing, I still have numbness, but the bruise-like pain is not there anymore Again, yay!

Of course, there are other things that cause pain, too. In my case, headaches, disc herniation, and muscle soreness from overuse, to name a few. I treat these with a variety of things, including OTC pain relievers, rest, sleeping on a memory foam contour pillow (for herniated cervical disc), breathing in steam (for sinus headaches), and a heating pad.

How do you treat stiffness and pain?

Like me, you might already know from experience that several different MS symptoms can happen together and can trigger one another, too! What a complicated disease! It's a constant challenge to live with, and a challenge for our doctors to help us treat it.

What about you? I would love to know about your stiffness and pain, and what you do to treat it. Thank you so much for reading about mine!