Well, I went to see him yesterday and overall it was a good visit. I told him I was still in a whole lot pain and he said, 'well, you broke your back.' Makes sense, although I thought it would have been feeling much better by now. He told me that he could do kyphoplasty for L2, L4, and L5 (L3 is not too bad). Basically they blow up a little balloon inside each fractured vertebrae which creates a hole which they fill with bone cement. Problem though is that you're much more likely to fracture adjacent vertebrae in the long term because the cement doesn't have any 'give' where a bone would normally be a bit smushier than cement. Also since I'm so young, I'd obviously have more time to develop said fractures. I asked how old the youngest person he did the procedure on was and he said 'like 50's'. Ok, so yes, I'm the exception.
I basically told him I was having conflicting feelings about what to do because since I have 2 small kids, I don't want this amount of pain to be the 'norm' for me. I mean, I don't think it's fair to my children and it's certainly not going to fly with me for very long. However, he said he could still do the surgery if it's not better in 2 months after trying to strengthen the muscles surrounding the fractures (and core muscles to straighten my spine) through physical therapy, so that's the option I'm going with. I'm hoping it will all get better before my next visit with him, but if not, I'm prepared to go ahead and get it fixed. I guess sometimes you just have to give it your best shot and if things don't work out, then go with the flow and see where it takes you.
2 comments:
Praying the physical therapy will help. I've had a bad back for a while and during a bad episode of my disc slipping out it took a good 3 weeks for it to feel better, so I can only imagine some fractured vertebrae are going to take a while longer. Again, I know mine is a different injury but physical therapy, once I got a good one through St. Joe's outpatient therapy, did wonders for my back. And if I feel the least bit of pain start to set in, I do my exercises and they really help.
Let's all pray that the lord will preform a miracle during those 2 months and you will not need the surgery from all that I've read there are a lot of risk's involved in that surgery especially with the other problems you have. I have heard someone say you don't get a miracle unless you really need one. Well we need one. What a wonderful thing that would be to have all your bone problems repaired without any surgery. It's asking a lot but our God is a big God.
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