I bet you are tired of reading about my pain. Try living with this crap day after day. Heck try it for 1 day and you will suddenly understand why it seems to dominate my life. I hate my pain and want my life back. Too bad I am sentenced to live for the rest of my life in pain. Surgery will not help. There is so much damage that I would need a couple at least to get any relief and then I would have to wait close to two years between them. That is the recommended time frame for major surgeries. It isn't like going in to blast one of my 7mm or larger kidney stones. They can do those about once a month.
So how much damage could one guy have ? Well that is a good question. Here is what I know is screwed up with my spine. I had a herniated disc at L4 in 99. I had surgery to repair it and remove bone spurs. Then in 2011 I had a return to pain. I thought it was a nice large kidney stone. That is where the pain was, over my kidneys. Then my leg started to go numb. So off I headed for a neurosurgeon. Had a CT scan and that showed some damage to my spine. My doctor said sorry I can't help you ! Off you go to pain management. Well he was a well respected neurosurgeon and so I decided to get a 2nd opinion from an orthopedic surgeon. A couple of MRIs and a CT scan later and the results sucked. L4 was now destroyed. This had resulted in L5/S1 Herniating as well as L3. My doctor gave me two options. Go in and clena up the discs. Remove the bone fragments from the herniated discs and sew me back up or go in and clean everything up and then fuse my spine from L3 down. He told me if I took the first option I would be back within a year to have the fusion.
Time for some soul searching. This was major surgery and all I had heard about spinal fusion was horrible. However my doctor had a new process. Well not brand new. I wasn't a guinea pig. He would use short rods between each disc and set screws into the "wings" on each disc to hold the rods in place. I talked to a coworker who had it done on her cervical spine. She was fine. Back to work and not much pain even though it was less than 4 months from surgery. This wasn't the 6 to 8 months of recovery that a regular fusion entailed. Finally broke down and said yes. Got my surgery date set. Then came the big day ! I got there at 6 am. I got prepped and met the nice lady who was passing gas. No she wasn't farting she was my anesthesiologist. Under I went and my doctor spent 9.5 hours fixing my back. I woke up in my room at the hospital. My loving wife, who had patiently waited in the uncomfortable waiting room with my mom in law and my wife's aunt was there. I was starving but they wouldn't feed me. Something about wanting to make sure my stomach woke up. It was fantastic in the hospital. I had a nice morphine type drip and a little button I could push to keep the pain away. Not much sleeping was done. It seemed like every time I would drift off in came the nurses. By the next morning I was ready to go home.
PT followed and I loved the aqua therapy. I pushed myself to get back to my old self. I followed the rules. I did the exercises. The pain didn't go away. This was new pain. I didn't have the sciatic pain and numbness in my left leg anymore, instead I had new pain. Right up and down my spine and a little to both sides. Sitting caused the pain to increase. My doctor discharged me to pain management. PT eventually ended as I ran out of the 30 visits per year my insurance allowed. I went back to work. I missed days because of pain. My life sucked. I hated it. I had this surgery to get rid of my pain. It did but I got all new pain. Eventually my job fired me because I missed too many days.
Jump on down for more on my struggle to get back to no pain
I fought and won to get unemployment. I found a new job. Life went on and so did the pain. Pain management tried shots, epidurals and all the other usual BS. Nothing really worked. Meanwhile I was paying $500.00 a month to keep my old insurance through COBRA. My new job was "Temporary" so no insurance. I stayed on and got hired full time . Life was better but the pain wasn't.
Fast forward through a couple years of pain management. My pain was actually increasing I was having sciatic pain again. I was having numbness again. So pain management couldn't fix it. They never got my pain below a 5. That really sucked. They upped my meds. Didn't help. I got more shots. Didn't help. I finally had a new CT scan. This was just over 2 and a half years after surgery. The news sucked. L3 had herniated again. L2 and L1 were herniated as well and so was T12. That was as far up as the CT scan had gone and that wasn't the end of the bad news. I had some bone spurs growing in the nerve canal. I had more bone spurs at the nerve root at L3,L4 and L5/S1 these were impinging on the nerves where they came out from the nerve canal. That explained my sciatic pain and the numbness in my left leg and my right. But wait that is not all. There's more just like one of those 3 am infomercials. I was starting to have pain shooting down my right arm just like the pain in my legs. All the way from my shoulder along the outside of my arm to the base of the hand. That hurt like hell. I was glad it wasn't constant. Very glad. It stopped me from working when it hit. Also my pain is traveling up my spine. It just isn't in the area where I had surgery. So now I will have a new CT scan of my thoracic and cervical spine. That will reveal more damage in my spine. Pain management has referred me back to my surgeon. I am betting I will hear a recommendation for more surgery. More fusion. Yet that won't fix my pain. Maybe if they go in and grind down the bone spurs they could relieve some of it. That is a big maybe. The chance of hitting a nerve while grinding down the spurs is high.
So my life sucks. Yep I admit it. I am depressed. Hell who the heck wouldn't be ? I am fed up with pain management. They have given up on me so I am giving up on them and looking for a new pain management clinic. I have a couple of good leads. I am going to check them out. I am not giving up my fight. I want to be rid of my pain. I have my wonderful wife at my side in this battle. Without her I probably would have given up long ago. I have my two wonderful fur babies who give me unconditional love, or sorry as they are called here Woozles. Can't find anyone who is better at showing unconditional love as they do. They keep my spirits up and keep me wanting to fight.
Maybe one day science will figure out how to get rid of my pain without making me a zombie. That is one thing I really hate. I don't want to be a complete zombie. I want to be able to continue to function and go to work yet not be in pain. I think that is pretty freaking reasonable. Don't you ? Don't I have the right to be pan free ? Must I live with some pain for the rest of my life ? I sure as hell hope not. I don't want to live with pain for the rest of my life. I will say it again : I don't want to live with pain for the rest of my life ! I am sick and tired of my pain. I am sick and tired of being tired all the time. I am sick and tired of being tired because I can't get to sleep most nights. I am tired of being depressed. I want my life back. I WANT TO BE FREE!