Travel Tips

July 25th, 2006

For those of you new to my story, let me recap... I have a bad back due to a scoliosis, and, after a long period of my back going in and out, it finally went for real in late February. Diagnosis: a ruptured disc in my L5/S1 area, with the rupture being right on top of the sciatic nerve. Ouch.

And so, on July 14, 2006, my surgeons did something called a microdiscectomy, which means basically going in and removing the piece of ruptured disc that is pressing on my sciatic nerve, and making space for the nerve by removing more disc material and possibly a bit of the vertebrae as well. It sounds scary but is a fairly common back/leg pain operation.

It's only been a week and a half since my surgery, and I must say I'm doing pretty well. I am still sore, needless to say, but I am able to walk around and take care of my bodily needs. My surgeon said that the surgery went well, though he wasn't happy to see the amount of scar tissue on my sciatic nerve; apparently my disc had been out of whack for a long time, and had calcified a bit, scraping against the nerve and doing a bit more damage than expected. It's too early to tell whether that will significantly affect my recovery, but the sciatic pain has decreased both in severity and in frequency.
So my mission now is to move around as much as possible without doing any twisting, bending, or lifting.

I have to say that I am really glad all of this occured at a time that I happened to have really good health insurance! Some folks may badmouth Kaiser, but I have nothing but good things to say about them.

Thanks to everyone for all of your support, especially to my buddy B1Bob. Friends are good things to have when you're going through something like this!

Here's Dad and me waiting to get on the gurney in pre-op.

Here's the result of a good day's work (well, 2 houors anyway) by my trusty doctors.

Wrapping up. My Stepmom just LOVED those purple gloves!

Back home in San Francisco the next day. I hobbled upstairs and went straight to bed, and my folks went back down south to SLO. It was sure nice of them to come up and be with me!

... and everything went well for a while. But I started getting a recurrence of the old pains. And then they got worse. And worse.

10/25/07 - One Year Later...

I did it!!!

I'm back home finally! We did the surgery on Friday, Oct. 19th, and I spent 5 days in the hospital recovering - the food was horrible - and, even though the TV had only 10 channels, TCM and the History Channel, luckily, were two of them.

But did it work???

The answer would appear to be yes - my crippling sciatic pain is gone! My right foot and calf are still very numb, and my back hurts like hell where they did the operation of course, but I'm doing a lot better than I thought I would. It feels like my spine is held together with a piece of twine (instead of what it's really held together with - which is a few screws and pins!).

12/04/07 -

Now a little over 6 weeks and I'm doing pretty well. Sadly, I don't have any pictures of my last operation. But I'll try to get someone to take one of my scar. I'm sure you're just dying in anticipation.

1/1/08 - Well now it is nearly 3 months since the operation and I'm doing great! At least, my doctors say so! I'm still sore with a meriad of aches and pains, but the back seems to be holding up well. This is going to be a great year, at least it can't be as bad as last year!