Back Surgery Number Three

I need a third surgery.  Four and a half years after my initial injury, I need surgery again. Right now, I don’t know what will be done but I am heading in for a CT scan this Friday and will see my surgeon a week after that. I found a growth on my spine that has been causing a lot of pain and is excruciating to have pressure on it. It could be bone, or cartilage, but either way I’ll have to get it removed.
If that happens the recovery is fairly straight forward, just painful.
There are s few other options, but none are as noninvasive as removing a spur.
It’s my 29th birthday tomorrow. It’s my fourth birthday injured.

As always, thanks for reading! – S.

The Never-Ending Back Story

Hello Again,

It has been a while since I posted here… Mostly because nothing has really changed. This is the same post as is on my other blog, so if you follow both don’t waste your time reading it all again. Also, if you don’t know about my other blog and would like to, please feel free to contact me. I am leaving this one up to serve as a resource for others, and will still update it as I have new information but I have turned to a personal blog to express what is going on inside my head. 

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

I thought I would finally try to put into words what happened with my surgeon, Dr. W., last week. Just as some background, I had a two level spinal fusion in March 2011. Immediately after the surgery it was considered a success because I could feel the nerve pathways that had been dead for several months, but I haven’t made much progress since. When you have a spinal fusion, at least in my case, there are different ways to do it, they take out discs from between your vertebrae, fuse bone into the space left behind and set the spacing by putting three screws in each vertebrae and attaching them with titanium rods. Then you have to wait over a year to see if the fusion takes and if you grow bone to fill the spaces.

Depression, Motivation and the Drive to Keep Going

Hi all my sorely neglected readers…

What has S. been up to? Recovering.

Recovery has taken over my life and now it is not just the physical recovery from surgery, nor is it only my emotional recovery, rather ‘Recovery’ has become the guiding force in my life. I am recovering from surgery, recovering from  heavy narcotic use and recovering from a deep and overwhelming depression. Actually, I want to be able to say I am recovering from depression but I haven’t quite rounded that corner yet.

Physically, I am recovering, at a snails pace, but I am recovering.

2011 in review

Interesting facts:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,500 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 58 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.