Grandma in need: An 87-year-old can barely move due to neck pain. Her grandson, a doctor himself, sets out to find a cause.
Recorded by Constanze Löffler
My mother called me one morning. My grandmother has terrible neck pain and can hardly move. She was 87 years old at the time and had been physically fit until then, going shopping and walking. She lived in a retirement community, and I drove there immediately. I found opiates in the medicine cabinet, but even these strong painkillers did little to alleviate her symptoms. My grandma stopped eating or drinking and lost a lot of weight over the next 24 hours. The emergency doctor referred her to the hospital where I still work today. My first thought was that her osteoporosis had caused a vertebra in her neck to collapse. The trauma surgeon ordered a computer tomography (CT) scan of the cervical spine. The vertebrae were not broken. I took her blood. The inflammation levels were greatly increased.
What was the reason for the highly inflammatory neck pain?