From Belief to Relief

The morning after his first baseball practice of the season, 14-year-old Dalton woke up with back pain so severe that his family took him to their local emergency department. But instead of finding relief, Dalton was met with disbelief.

“They said I was probably exaggerating the pain. It was probably nothing bad,” Dalton says. “It felt like no one believed me; no one believed my pain.”

That changed when Dalton came to Phoenix Children's and met Sean Gamble, MD, a pediatric pain physician and interventional specialist. Dr. Gamble quickly determined that Dalton had a herniated disk and was a good candidate for an epidural steroid injection to relieve the pain.

Dalton was able to undergo the procedure right away in Phoenix Children's new state-of-the-art interventional pain suite—a space built specifically with cases like Dalton's in mind.

“Essentially, our team validates the pain experience, number one,” Dr. Gamble says. “It is very demoralizing to patients when they don't feel validated or heard. And this clinic gives them that voice.”

The new suite has made a world of difference for patients like Dalton, who no longer have to wait weeks or even months to get relief from their pain.

“Prior to opening up the suite, the timeline was eight to 12 weeks before we could get a patient evaluated and into the operating room for an injection that would take just a few minutes with an X-ray or an ultrasound,” says Dr. Gamble. “Having the suite here in our ambulatory procedure area allows us to sometimes go from evaluation to intervention the same day.”

Dalton is grateful to Dr. Gamble for giving him hope at the moment he needed it most. “Dr. Gamble put hope back in my heart that I'm going to get healthy. I'm going to get fixed. I'm not going to be stuck like this for the rest of my life,” he says.