[joehiker]

I am a young active man in my early thirtys. Roughly one year ago I decided to take the plunge into nerve stimulation. Going through trial was an interesting experience and quite a shocking, painful, hard to understand, rushed and eventful task. Given the option of peripheral stim as opposed to spinal implant was a hard call. Do I look at the lower back pain as a local pain signal or is it coming from somewhere else ? Is the pain in my legs and feet from my low back or something else ? If I make the wrong choice what are my options ? My hip hurts but is it a seperate ailment ?
So I made up my mind and was feeling satisfied with the peripheral nerve stimulation. I had one lead placed diagonally across my low back and a lead placed vertically on both sides just on top my buttocks with a non- rechargeable battery placed under my left side lead in the soft tissue. The implanted device was nothing like the trial. This left me feeling glad that the stinging pain in the lead area was not nearly as severe as the trial but also less satisfied with the lack of coverage.
Constant changes took place while the healing continued and the unit was more comfortable, but the leads required more voltage to be used to kill the pain because of scar tissue. After less than 1 year the system simply quit working. I then scheduled an appointment with Medtronics only to find out that my non-rechargeable implanted battery was dead. The system did help with my pain somewhat but I knew that I had made the wrong choice. This was and still is very hard to swallow.
Knowing what I had felt from this treatment I knew I was on the right track but was quite sceptical when they wanted to try a set of spinal implants. I already had the peripheral leads implanted and could not see just leaving them in my body at no use. I then chose to have a rechargeable battery placed along with two spinal leads and a reconnection of two out of three previously implanted leads. This treatment is completely different from the peripheral stimulation. I now have the ability to adjust not only both sides of my body seperately with the spinal implants but also the peripheral leads on there own. I am now three months into this and feeling much better about the whole thing and feeling less pain.
The reason for this post is to help anyone who feels alone in this treatment and has searched for information from a patient with no luck. If you have any questions or have been through this please feel free to contact me.