I now know what's like to be stabbed in the gut with a kitchen knife

After spending the last three weeks flat on my back and more of the same for the next three, I decided to join bloggers. Unfortunately for you the readers, I won’t have much to blog about. I big event of each day is that I get to go for a five minute walk once a day. Whoopee! I don’t know how I’ll contain my excitement.

I had an anterior interbody lumbar fusion. This involves:

1. A four-inch incision below the belly button on the left side.

2. While one doctor holds things out of the way the second doctor removed what was left of the disc between by L5 and S1 backbones. (that is where the backbone connects to the tailbone). Actually, for me this step involved removing scare tissue instead of disc tissue because the doc said that was all that was left.
SIDE NOTE: I wonder what makes a great hold-the-guts-outta-the-way doctor stand out from the merely good ones.

3. Two titanium screws are drilled into each vertebrae.

4. The vertebrae are pushed a part. They were about 1/8 of an inch a part; they are now about an inch. Some fibrous material in inserted between the discs. Bone will grow over this material thus creating one big vertebrae.

5. A plate is screwed on between the two vertebrae to keep everything in place.

While the bone is growing between the two vertebrae, I need a lot of bed rest. I can’t even sit up for very long periods of time and every time I get up I have to wear a brace. People who have become active too soon have actual caused the screws to pop out or break. It will take at least three months for the bone to full fuse the two vertebrae.

Some days the pain is better than others, but I have noticed that if I sit up and/or walk around too much on the good days, I pay for it later. My worst pain is in my left leg. It only occurs occasionally, but I get real bad nerve pain and muscle cramps.

This type of procedure has about a 70% chance of providing some improvement in pain. The big question is how much improvement will I get? Only time will tell. Oh, and I forgot to mention, my disc was so far gone that I may even be measurable taller now. :)