wow, what a great thread. i wish i had found this earlier. both before my first surgery, and just earlier now, before i started posting around the net.

i'm 30. i did gymnastics for about 10 years, and competed for 7 of those 10. my doctors and i agree this prolly gave me minor problems from the outset.

september 07, i fell two feet, landed square on my butt, and within a day or two developed completely incapacitating pain in my lower back, and down my left leg.

(drama edited out - hospitals suck, btw. if you're insanely curious, i did write a very amusing blog of my experience, email me and i'll forward it to you. just be nice or i'll throw poo at you )

turns out i had ruptured/herniated/bulged my L5/S1 disc 13 MM onto my spine. through the hurry and pain and drugs (that first hospital had me on about a dozen things), the doctor just went with a microdiscectomy (small cut in back, small hole in vertebrae, they scrape out the disc 'ooze', sew you back up).

morphine didn't work for me, it just made me dizzy, no pain relief. diladid worked great. i don't know what that stuff is, but it worked. percocet at home worked, too. and no prollems coming off of it.

then i was ok for a few months, after the PT, of course.

then the pain came back.

my new doctor (the old one was kind of a jerk) says i have scar tissue buildup, and my disc is so 'deflated', the vertebrae on top of it is flopping around and hitting my spine again. he wants to try epidural cortisone injections, along with another round of PT. i'm not confident this will work, since it didn't last time.

the other option, so he says, is a L5/S1 fusion. i'm only 30....well... 31 in a few weeks, but that's hardly old, and i don't have any family history of spinal stenosis or other bone problems, so i'm not worried about that. AND the doctor wants to go in ANTERIORLY, which, since he has a colleague who regularly does this (it's the other guy's specialty), and the way he explained it, i'm not worried about that. i'm not particularly worried about the fusion itself, either. rehab is going to SUCK, but after that, the man says i can go horseback riding. he also says that my loss of flexibility will be minimal, if i even notice it at all.

i'm also not worried about the doctor. first, he's old. and still practicing, so he hasn't been sued into retirement. also, he was one of like 15 doctors nationwide asked to participate in disc replacement experimentation, so i'm guessing he knows his stuff.



what i AM worried about is going under the knife. again. and the eviceration. not for the sake of the actual cutting (well, that's another subject), but for the additional rehab'ing. i'm also worried if i'll really be THAT capable again. i hurt right now. pretty much all the time, but as long as i stay as lazy as possible (i can't walk more than 15 minutes before i get bad back pain), i'm mostly ok. but what kind of life is that? and i'm putting on weight, and worried about keeping my girl around (at least the rest of me works ).



WILL it be ok? WILL i be able to be as active as a 30-something body should be? how common ARE staph infections? how LONG will it take until i can drive to the grocery store? how long until i can walk my dog for an hour? how long until i've reached maximum medical improvement (MMI)? what kind of settlement should i try to get out of my worker's comp (which, thank god, union labor mandates)? can i avoid bm's be having nothing but soup broth? (sitting on and getting up from the toilet REALLY hurt post-op, and i'll be damned if i need help wiping)

at the very least, thanks for keeping this going, especially you mike!

justin