"Help me or take me."

That was Andrea Katz McCutcheon's plea to God the night before doctors would try a procedure that she hoped would wipe out the excruciating facial pain that had left her debilitated for years.

	Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette Andrea Katz McCutcheon donated money to create an educational endowment for pain medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

I n her case, the implantation of a pain pump worked, and the 59-year-old Squirrel Hill woman got her life back. "It was the worst pain known to man," she recalled recently.

McCutcheon, the daughter of the late Pittsburgh philanthropist Joseph Katz, was so grateful that she's donated $50,000 to University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's pain clinic to establish an educational endowment for pain medicine fellows. The gift provides $10,000 a year for five years to train at least six fellows a year as well as residents. It also will support library acquisitions, journals, lectureships and other educational activities.

It was her second gift. Two years ago she contributed $30,000 to help establish the pain medicine division.

"We call her our pain medicine angel," says Dr. Doris K. Cope, professor of anesthesiology and director of the pain medicine program. This will help fund one of the largest pain medicine fellowships in the world.

In 1996, McCutcheon developed trigeminal neuralgia, a disorder of the cranial nerve that carries sensation from the face to the brain. It is marked by zaps of excruciating pain, which for her were concentrated in the nasal area.

She first sought relief from her dentist, thinking it was related to recent dental surgery. Doctors then examined her for the painful nerve disorder in the jaw area known as TMJ. It wasn't until she accompanied her husband to an allergist that a doctor there suggested she might have trigeminal neuralgia.

A procedure designed to treat the condition failed to bring relief; even a summer she spent at a pain clinic at renowned Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore didn't help.

"It incapacitated me for almost three years," McCutcheon recalled of the pain. "One time I didn't go outside for a whole year. I had lost all hope."

A few years ago, Cope took a gamble on implanting a pain pump in McCutcheon's abdominal area that delivers pain medicine directly to the receptors in the spinal cord. At the time, the pump, about the size of a hockey puck, had been used primarily to treat lower back pain.

In McCutcheon's case, doctors threaded a catheter along the spinal column toward her neck to deliver the medication.

"It's very exciting that it works for her," Cope said, noting it was one of the first pumps implanted to treat this condition.

With all patients, pain doctors first put in a temporary epidural catheter that mimics how the medication will be delivered to make sure the patient can tolerate it and experiences pain relief. She said 95 percent of the procedures are successful.

The division has now implanted about 150 pumps to soothe various conditions.

McCutcheon expects to wear the device for the rest of her life. It's refilled every 2 1/2 months.

But that's a minor sacrifice compared with the pain she was experiencing.

"I'm not a religious person, but I couldn't go on living any more with the pain," she said. "I said to God, 'Help me or take me.' He helped me. I wanted to help other people."