COVINGTON, La. - We all know the pain of a throbbing headache, but for some people the suffering is nearly constant. Their jobs and relationships suffer too.
But now a Covington doctor is the first to figure out a new way, using a surgical implant, to relieve the pain.
Gary Goodlett's has lived in near-constant pain for several decades.
"I had no view of the parameter. I couldn't move my eyes. I couldn't bend my head. If I bent my head down, it felt like my head was going to explode," Goodlett, 53 of Mandeville, said.
Gary believes the pain he feels this day, and everyday, is from school football concussions and injuries. His chronic headaches were treated with opiods. Those addictive pain killers changed his personality. The symptoms changed his life.
"It was so hard to see him in pain because this wasn't the man I married, you know. He was so active, energetic," said Gary's wife Donna Goodlett apologizing for her tears. "And for so long he just sat there."
Life became going to work as a hospital cath lab technologist and coming home to his sofa. Then, Gary had a chance to be one of the first to try something different. Neurologist and interventional pain expert Dr. Chad Domangue, was an expert at using internal nerve stimulation that has been on the market for years. An implant sends impulses along the nerves, interrupting the pain signal to the brain with a pleasant sensation.
"It takes away that chronic ache. It takes away that burn, that throb, the alarm system that won't shut off," explained Dr. Domangue who has a clinic in Covington, La.
But Dr. Domangue had a theory. Instead of stimulating just two nerves in the back of the head where people feel the headaches, he thought of stimulating two extra nerves where the headaches start, in the base of your skull, near your spinal cord.
"So not only that I put the wires at the base of the skull, but I put the wires actually in the neck, because the headache center actually dips down into the neck," he said.
His three-year study on 15 patients, made the cover of a peer-reviewed medical journal. The patients said it changed, even saved their lives.
"Everyone that I've put it in, has done extremely well. I've never taken one of these systems out because they didn't like it," Dr. Domangue said.
Gary was one of those test patients. It worked so well he was eligible for updated, new technology. A team of more than a dozen people were in the O.R. at Cypress Pointe Surgical Hospital in Hammond as Dr. Domangue removed the old implant and put in the new.
About an hour to an hour and a half into surgery, the device was ready to be tested. A computer screen had visuals that represent the four leads, with eight contacts on each of the leads that has been implanted on the nerves. The medical team was ready to see if they were going to be stimulating the nerve in the right spot.
The team from Boston Scientific, the implant company, was in the O.R. too. Immediately, when Gary woke up in the recovery room, they tested the stimulation to get the right power.
Then, just one week later, a man who loved doing home renovation, was up and refinishing his front door, pain free.
"I told my wife on the way home, I said I forgot what it was like to feel this way," remembered Gary, who said his pain went from an eight to a zero on a scale of one to 10.
"His eyes got blue again. His color came back. You could just see it he was like, a relief. You know, he's finally not in pain. Finally," said Donna.
For each implant, the Goodlett family had to fight insurance, for many months, to approve the nerve stimulation treatment. They even needed the help of an attorney.
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