D4s L33t B33r P0urs F0rth

For folks who have been inquiring and not seeing my little updates here and there on Facebook I thought I’d post up more details of what happened and what is going to be happening:

It all started in May/June 2009 when somewhere along the way I tweaked my back just right. In the past I’ve injured my back and not worried about it too much since it would go away a couple of weeks later. But this time it stuck around and got worse as time went by. Finally at the end of July the pain was to the point that I could not walk or stand or sit without there being a lot of pain. I broke down and went to see a doctor. Happy birthday Niekon… you apparently have Sciatica. A condition where the discs are resting against the sciatic nerve in the lower part of your back.
With the initial diagnosis I began trying a battery of medicines to alleviate the pain. The idea was to bring down the inflammation from the disc to that section of the nerves. Nothing was working… and if it did, it wasn’t for a very long period of time. A couple of weeks later after the initial drug treatments and a week off from work I was kicked forward to Sports Medicine where I was given more drugs to try and alleviate the pain, a pain management regimen. But i thought I’d give a more detailed listing/timeline below.

The timeline of the drugs prescribed and everything else:
7/27/09: Naproxen 500mg & Cyclbenzaprine 10mg (aka Naprosyn & Flexeril)… the Naprosyn screwed with my head and it affected my thought process to the point that I was missing certain things with my work process. I was off of those within a couple of weeks.

8/10/09: Methylpredinsolone 4mg & Meloxicam 15mg (aka Medrol & Mobic)… this was the beginning of the steroids being introduced to my system. Thankfully it was only for a week of taking the Medrol. The only issue I had was that the Mobic was alleviating the pain like I thought it should and I was having to watch the clock to pop the next pill.

8/19/09: Endocet 5-325mg & Nortriptyline 10mg (aka Percocet & Nortriptyline)… now we are getting in the more interesting medicines. The percocet was prescribed and I had to physically be there to put in the prescription to the pharmacy and wait about 20-30 minutes while it was retrieved from a safe. The nortriptyline is actually an anti-depressant but they have used it as a pain management tool for people with back pain. It apparently had a 65% success rate. Guess who was in the 35% fail rate?

8/31/09: began physical therapy which included the use of traction (I call it The Rack) and electrical stimulation (The Shocker). The Rack was the main one that was used when I was there. After a while it got the point that I would snooze out for the 20-minute session.

10/02/09: received my first cortisone steroid epidural injection. Would have been the perfect end to my day except i was attending the Star Wars in Concert event later that night. I don’t remember much between getting the shot and waking up a bit before the concert… but apparently I was really out of it. And then part way through the first half of the concert the local anesthetic wore off and it became quite painful to remain in the sitting position. Thankfully we had brought the percocet along just in case and I was feeling not too much pain shortly thereafter. The effects of the short worked nicely for a week or so and then started to wear off quickly.

11/06/09: received my second cortisone steroid epidural. This time there were no concerts to attend that evening… in fact, this was the beginning of what was supposed to be a week long vacation. Oops? There were several plans made and all of them had to be scraped because of my back injury. I couldn’t fly anywhere because I was in too much pain sitting in one place for too long. Imagine me trying to get up after sitting in an airplane for several hours… the pain would be so intense that the noise coming from my mouth would frighten passengers and flight crew alike and I’d be banned from future flights.

12/27/09: second epidural had last a bit longer than the first but I was still in pain. I had finally managed to move back to my computer desk from the couch a couple of weeks prior. Sadly I was still having issues with sitting for any period of time. To add to the already growing pain, I re-aggravated the area while moving my KitchenAid stand mixer… biggest mistake I’d made in several months of dealing with this. Five minutes later I was in so much pain that I knew I was in trouble again. At that point in time I knew that this was not going to go away easily and that I’d be having a third injection or would become a candidate for surgery.

1/14/10: back in to see my Sports Medicine doctor… and the options were put on the table: try to continue dealing with is as is, get the third injection, or surgery. I chose Option #3 and the referral was placed.

1/22/10: went in to meet with the neurosurgeon who would be working on me. Brought Milady along so that she knew what I was about to undergo as well… and to ask any sort of questions I might have missed. The consult/evaluation proved that I was indeed a candidate for surgery.
The notes from that consult are as follows:
“Your MRI shows a right side L5/S1 disc protrusion, which is pressing on the R S1 nerve. This corresponds it the pain that you have in the right hamstring. Most people improve in a 3 month period, but as your systems persist, it is reasonable to undergo surgery.
“Surgery is a mircodiscectomy; patients are usually here for a 23 hour observation. I usually recommend 4-6 weeks off work and no lifting for 6 weeks.
“The most significant ‘risk’ of surgery is recurrent disc herniation, as the aim of surgery is to remove only the displaced fragment.
“I will place you on the OR list. You will be called by our scheduler with the next available date (usually 4-6 weeks out).”

To put it simply… I have a disc that is bulging out between from the spine and is putting pressure on the nerve sack that is below the spinal cord (several inches below the cord for those who might be worried). They will be making about a 2-3 inch incision into my back and will be shaving off that bulging part of my disc that is pressing on the nerve sack. The entire procedure is done via microscope and is about as non-evasive as you can get. For the 6 weeks following the procedure, the most I’ll be able to lift is 5 pounds. After that 6 weeks and when I return to work I can begin slowly increasing the amount of weight I can lift. Around that time I’m also going to be able to begin my workout sessions again on a more regular basis to drop the weight that I’ve managed to gain in the past 6-7 months. When this all went down, I was weighing around 160-170 pounds. I am now a bit over 200 pounds. that was a huge weight gain on my part… and a lot of it was because I was limited to what I could physically do. I really don’t want to have to go out and buy new clothes… so I’m going to work my ass off to get back down to that 160-170 range again.

And that about covers it. I’ll probably be cross-posting this to several places since not everyone reads each one of my journal locations. So if you see this once, you can pretty much ignore it everywhere else.

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