Shae Eichele-Gawry says a treatment called DRG therapy cut the CRPS pain in her left leg by 80%, after years in which a cheerleading injury led to surgeries, rehab and pain that kept getting worse. She is now back to an active lifestyle and says the change gave her a second chance.
Her pain began after she was dropped during a cheerleading stunt in 2018, when she was 18, and she later had two major reconstructions of her left leg. She went through physical therapy and a typical orthopedic recovery plan, but the pain did not settle down. Instead, it intensified enough that she was diagnosed with CRPS in 2020, a condition that can keep pain going well beyond the expected healing period after an injury or surgery.
That diagnosis matters because CRPS is not ordinary post-surgical discomfort. It can bring burning pain, skin discoloration, swelling, tingling and other unusual sensations near the affected area, and Dr. Allen Burton said it affects about 200,000 Americans every year. He said patients may first see a surgeon or primary care physician before being sent to a pain specialist, which is often where the search for relief shifts from routine recovery to more targeted treatment.
For Eichele-Gawry, that search included medication and injections before she received a dorsal root ganglion stimulator. Burton described the Abbott Proclaim DRG system as a small wire placed near the DRG that delivers a gentle electrical pulse to quiet irritated nerves, a different approach from medicine or injections because it tries to interrupt the pain signal itself rather than only dulling symptoms. He said his team generally sees a response in more than 80% of patients during both the trial and the implant.
The friction in her story is that the usual recovery path did not help her. She did what many patients are told to do after surgery: follow rehab, keep moving and wait for healing. Instead, the pain worsened. That is what makes her account stand out, and it is also the part that keeps the question open for other patients living with CRPS: how long the relief lasts once the stimulator is in place. For now, Eichele-Gawry says the device changed her life, and for her that result was enough to get back to the active life she thought she had lost.
