It’s back to the table for me. That is, my back on an
operating table, this coming Thursday, October 25. Before you suggest an
alternative treatment, please allow me to assure you that I really have
approached this as a last resort, even though I have taken this direction
before.
On Thursday, August 1, 2013, persistent pain I was
experiencing in my right leg was relieved when a surgeon performed a laminotomy
on my fourth lumbar vertebra and cleared the stenosis being created by the disc
just below it. The person performing the surgery was a celebrated professor of orthopedic
spine medicine, who had conducted many such surgeries in the past but whose
reputation was for spinal reconstruction – especially of children with
scoliosis and other deformities. So, my surgery was without a doubt a walk in
the park for him. Still, he took with me all the protocols he would have taken
with a much more severe spinal problem. So I was in the hospital for four days…
recovering not only from the surgery itself but also from the anesthesia, and having
some pretty arduous physical therapy sessions. I was put on a walker for six
weeks and strongly warned against returning to work in less than two.
That surgery was an outcome following three months of
increasing symptoms that had been unresolved by chiropractic, including
adjustments, acupuncture, and massage, followed by physical therapy and two
injections of steroids to the affected area. The extreme solution of surgery
was that to which I was resigned. But from the moment I came awake after the
surgery, I could tell that my symptoms were relieved.
And I can honestly say that, since August 1, 2013, I have
considered myself to be living well. The post-surgery physical therapy I was
assigned put me pretty quickly back on the literal road to recovery. I was even
able eventually to return to running at least ten miles a week, most weeks
since.
But on August 9, this year, after the eighth mile for the
week and what felt like a pretty good two-mile run, I was beginning the opening
portion of strengthening exercises for the day when I noticed a slight twinge
in my back on the left side, then a powerful one. I thought to myself, “OK,
that’ll be all for today.”
That was all, up to now. The following weekend, I was experiencing
lower back muscle spasms, making it difficult to bend. By the following weekend,
getting into bed required climbing up onto the mattress on all fours and collapsing
to one side or the other, to lie down. To get out of be required me to lie on
my right side and ease my right foot to the floor, then prop myself up (slowly!)
into a standing position. I could not comfortably sit on the edge of the bed or
seat myself in a chair.
I saw my personal physician on August 16, and he prescribed
anti-inflammatories including prednisone, which I tried for two weeks. These
seemed to quiet the lower back pain, but now sciatica showed up in my left leg
feeling very familiar to that which I had experienced in 2013.
By this time, I was more comfortably mobile, but I was
visibly limping from numbness and weakness in my left leg, from the tip of my
middle toe, around the outside of the foot, through the heel and ankle, and up
my calf and the back of my thigh.
The doctor prescribed a different anti-inflammatory and set
me up with physical therapy. After three and a half weeks of physical therapy.
In the second week, it became impossible even for me to operate a stationary
recumbent bicycle, and the therapist, who had at the start been confident that
this was a “soft tissue issue” able to be resolved with the right application
of gentle exercise, stretching, massage, and maybe a little traction, suggested
that a shot of an anti-inflammatory into the affected area might prove helpful.
My physician ordered an MRI and referred me to a new
orthopedic surgeon – someone, I requested, considerably less conservative than
my first. This surgeon decided to follow the same measure as my physical
therapist was advising, and five days later I was receiving that steroid
injection (the same date two months after my initial severe symptoms).
There was no relief, and so, yesterday, ten days since the
steroid injection, I sat down with the surgeon who showed me my MRI and the
stenosis caused by a herniated disc at Lumbar 4 / Sacral 5 pressing against the
sciatic nerve. Visual evidence says, that’s a lot of compression happening
there. However, he also showed me the rest of my spine: the previous surgeon’s
work is holding up very well, and the rest of my back is healthy and strong. He
says, this should be it for work like this.
I think about my dad, who has had three such surgeries,
including fusion at L4/L5 when he was in his late thirties and a discectomy at
L5/S1 just a month after my surgery, five years ago. Now in his early eighties,
Dad experiences neuropathy in his own left foot that may be related to similar circumstances
as my own. Dad and I have both “enjoyed” the option of surgery to correct what
appears to be due in our DNA to a predisposition toward degenerative lower
discs. His grandfather walked with either crutches or a cane for all Dad’s life;
and my grandfather suffered with debilitating back pain, as have Dad and his
older brother Bob.
Much as I may shudder at the fact that surgery has seemed so
necessary for Dad and me, it is strangely comforting to know that this option
exists, since so little relief is gained from alternative treatments.
Prayers are welcome. I’ll let you know how it all goes.
