I haven't blogged in while because, basically, I have been in too much pain to do it.
One of the down sides of a disc fusion is that when you fuse one disk you put more pressure on the disks directly above the fused one. Your backbone holds all your weight and each disk acts as a little shock absorber. When you fuse a disc, you remove all the absorption. What weight the fused disk used to soak up is now put on the other discs.
Going into my surgery, I knew I had three discs that were messed up: the bottom three (L5, L4, L3). The L5 disc was 90% gone, the L4 has some bone spurs and small bulging, while the L3 has a tear in the disc. With three discs messed, it is hard to know excatly where the pain is coming from. But based on my symptoms (right leg pain) and the fact that I only had 10% of the disc left, it seemed that the culprit was most likely my L5.
I got opinions from three surgeons. The first wanted to fuse all three disc. The second said I should only fuse one and see how it goes. If the pain still continued then I could always go back in and fuse the other two. The last was pretty confident that the majority of my pain was coming from the L5 and that was the only one that needed to be fused. So of course, I went with the least aggressive option.
Things were improving slow and steady (and I mean SLOW)until a week from last Thursday. Thursday morning I woke up in level 10 pain (the scale is 0 to 10). I thought maybe the screws came loose or something. The pain dropped to level 8 by Sunday (still very painful). I saw the doctor on Monday. He took some xrays which showed that all the metal parts were in place.
However, when he felt my back he noticed that the pain was coming from the L3 not the L5 (which was fused). I get an MRI today so we can look at the soft tissue to see what is going on. I might have to go back in for another surgery but things are slowly improving so hopefully it was just an anomaly.
The worst part - my doctor is going on vacation over the holidays so I won't know the results of the MRI until Jan 6th.
