Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Burn, baby, burn. Disc inferno

As many of you know, I had back surgery in September. It went well. I was feeling fine. Up until about a week ago. Then the back pain returned with a vengeance.

This image to the right is my MRI from August. That circled area is where my discs were poking out. The top one was the problematic one.

Yesterday I went to see my doctor and he sent me out for another MRI and had me come back in afterward to go over the results.

While I don't have the actual images from the latest MRI, this quick shop illustrates what I saw yesterday.

Apparently, after cutting off a bit of a disc, there is a slight chance (like 7 or 8 percent of patients who undergo these surgeries) that the disc will shift and re-herniate. I guess I'm now part of the slight chance statistic.

So, I'm going in Friday to get it taken care of and will be laid up most of the holiday season. I was going to wait until next year, but we've met our annual insurance caps, so the surgery will be free as long as I have it done this year.

The upside is that the chance of recurrence after this surgery is phenomenally low. Hopefully I'm not phenomenal.

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