Hi Pooh-Thank you for your reply regarding your days tending to overdo. Having been so often in the OR myself after my wreck [a total of 25 times I think] I have developed a DEEP gratitude and respect for you, YOU, and those around you who stand for so many hours putting us back together again. If you have been working acute care and surgery your task load has been pretty close to the edge of tolerable. I understand having tried to practice in my profession after surgery. I couldn'y pull the eighteen hour days so many of my clients had grown to know and EXPECT of my. That was when in pain I really hit a wall of recognition for myself.

Now, with the results in on my trial having demonstrated approximately 70% to 100% pain relief, I can see a light at the end of my tunnel in hopes of returning to my field. Some feelers are out there, and I am praying for that kind of release for myself----- as my family needs the income and security and I need the feeling of being a contributor to society once again. Sure, I write on this forum and elsewhere, but I was used to doing SO MUCH MORE.

Maybe what all of this boils down to is we need self recognition and awareness as we take those steps back to whatever we each understood as normalcy in our lives that we allow for the need to protect, to rest, to strive hard for those who expect performance but take advantage when moments allow for peace, for rest, to let our bodies catch up as we establish new rhythms. No doubt these rhythms will be different than what we knew in the past, but looking positively at what we will have achieved, we will know we have done well.

So my friend Pooh might be a task driven care dispensing holder of the needs of patients in her life after SCS, but she will need to allow that healing and new rhythm somehow to find equilibrium in new life. I may never be the go get 'em fly across the whole country hard charging lawyer once known by my peers and clients, but I hope with the SCS I will come to know the equilibrium which will be mine post surgically. I sort of found it after the first huge lumbar spine surgery, and then there were more, and more, and more, and the nerves were damaged. OK. But I intend to defeat this pain and not let it hold me captive anymore. Like my friend Pooh, I want to be out there again, and hopefully serve the needs of others while paying attention to my new equilibrium.

That's what it is all about isn't it? Recognizing while we may seem healed from some issues because symptoms seem abated, there are true limitations to the benefits we realize from the stimuli of the SCS. There just have to be. Thus, we CAN make it. We CAN return to things. Just mindful of our new set of human limitations.

Wish I could reach out and hug you right now, Pooh, because I reckon you could use it, so, well, here is what I CAN do The thought is there.

May you have peace and rest this evening and take joy in what you are able to do now that you have had the SCS,
Prayers coming your way,
Mark56