Oh, blargh!

[jennlk]

grumble. grumble. piss and moan. [end whine]

{cue muppet announcer voice}The continu-uu-ing sto-ooor-ry of a back that's gone to the dogs docs. {end muppet announcer voice}

In our last installment, our intrepid patient had recovered from a "standard" epidural injection. While xrays showed it was a technically successful injection, there was no relief for the patient.

So, off to the back doc again. "didn't work? huh. bummer" (you ain't kidding!) OK, new options are:

• do nothing. Not acceptable, at this point. At the rate it's progressing, I'll be lucky to be able to walk by November.


• different steroid injection. The thinking here is that a possible reason that the prior injection didn't work is that the steroid was prevented from getting to the nerve by the protruding disk membrane. This injection would be lower down in the spine, where the nerve bundle comes out of the spinal channel.


• different med (neurontin, which is a nerve med, and works on the nerve pain from the pinched nerve). Decent chance of success, except that I don't have a lot of pain, so I declined. I have enough problems with meds anyway, I do not want to be taking a nerve med that might not work. When I declined this one, he seemed rather relieved -- he said that it only really works on about 10-15% of his patients, with the others showing no improvement, or not enough to balance the side effects


• referral to a back surgeon for evaluation and consultation. My doc (not a surgeon, just a spinal ortho) thinks that I may not be able to get away with a microdiscectomy {which is an outpatient procedure (they do it laprascopically) with about a 3 day recovery period} because of the bulging disk just above the ruptured disk. So that would mean fusion, which is a real operation with scalpels and drills and plates and screws and an extended recovery period.

So what we are doing is the injection (1) and a referral to a back surgeon. Who is at the Chelsea Hospital, and just went to full-time there, so I should get in fairly quickly. (His office closes at 4 on Monday, so the referral clerk wasn't able to make an appointment today.)


(1)yes, he talked me into it. He said it wouldn't be any worse than the prior one, and has a better chance of working.

(edited to correct muppet announcer line. sorry folks. I should know my muppet show better than that.)

Comments

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

Good luck.

[jennlk]

thanks....

[bwittig.livejournal.com]

My Mom just went through back surgery last November. She had a difficult recovery for the first month or so, (gee at 75 wonder why?), but now she is back to painless walking and is standing up straight. So surgery can help.

Hope the simple(r) solution works for you!

But if the surgeon has large floppy ears and is punning, you might want to consider another surgeon. (I'm not sure if it is bad if the nurse is using the anesthesia mask.)

[jennlk]

I haven't watched the DVDs recently, but I don't remember Rowlf ever actually *cutting* into a patient. Having them stomp off or holler at him, yeah -- they usually just laid there in silence (suffering - those puns are really hard to not react to), or occasionally "helped" out with the puns.