I went for a follow-up with my orthopedic doctor in regards to my back pain. This was the follow-up after the two cortisone injections I had. I thought I was going to hear about a simple pain relief outpatient procedure, which was the percutaneous disc decompression (nucleoplasty) I'd mentioned in another post. Instead, I found out that I’m actually a candidate for disc replacement or spinal fusion. Totally not what I was expecting. At all. I was kind of in shock.
Apparently the herniation in my disc is pretty big and the nucleoplasty (disc decompression) isn’t possible. A mini discectomy isn’t possible either since my disc is thinning out. I was kind of in a daze and on information overload at that point, but it was something about the condition of the disc, the size of the herniation and the very small space and location in which to do the work. The doctor said his first choice would be fusion. Not that disc replacement can't be successful–it is for many people–but he felt for my situation, a fusion would be the best choice. A prosthetic disc can wear out and if they have to go back in to replace it at some point, they'd be working through scar tissue from the initial surgery, which could be dicey.
He ordered an updated MRI, which I had a couple weeks ago. I looked at the MRI since I have the previous one and I now know what I’m looking at, and the affected disc didn't look any better than it did six months ago. I went the following week to have him read it, and he confirmed it's not any better. He also said my scoliosis curve has started to worsen. That scares me, because it hasn't changed since I was a teenager. Hopefully it doesn't get worse. I have to assume it's gotten worse because of the disc problem.
Here are the two images of my bulging disc. The view is from the bottom, up, as though you're looking up from the floor. That means that the right side of the image is actually the left side of my body. The one is September 2017 and the bottom one is March 2018. As you can see, not much difference between the two.
We talked again about fusion again. He said that I'd be out of work for a couple months and overall recovery would be quite long. I'd have to be pretty careful for at least a year so that the bones have a chance to fuse together completely. After thinking about how long the recovery would be, what my pain level is now, and the fact that a fusion could place more strain on the joints above and below the fused vertebrae making them weaker, I made the decision to not have surgery at this time. I think if my pain level was at a point where it prevented me from doing a lot of routine things, I'd definitely go for the fusion; however, my pain in more along the lines of nagging, annoying and distracting.
What will I do instead? I'm going to try one more round of cortisone injections. If these don't help, I'll have to wait until the Fall to try again, since I'm limited to three rounds every nine months. Also, I bought an inversion table. A friend of mine, who has the same disc problem I do, has been using one for years and she said it's a total lifesaver. I got it last week and I've started using it.
This is the one I bought. It's the Teeter EP-960. I'll post more about it once I've been using it for a bit.
Other options are acupuncture or massage. The doctor also suggested chiropractic care; however, I tried that for the last two months with no luck. I had to cut the chiropractor loose last week. I was really disappointed it didn't work, since it's worked for me in the past.
I really want to get back to living my life as I was before, so I'm going to try the injections and the inversion table and see what happens. Maybe I'll be able to avoid surgery.
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