We are nothing but a file!!

To continue my story from the last post, When my wife got me home, I was in horrible pain. After about 2 weeks of this my wife requested a meeting with the Doctor who performed the surgery. At first he told my wife that he just didn't believe that I was in that kind of pain. Finally, he decided that I should come back to the hospital for another CT scan. He said, after the test, that it looked liked a small piece of bone that had come loose during the surgery. So Guess what!! I had the same surgery all over again. I just thought I was in pain before. After about 2 weeks he refused to even take our calls. He did refer me to another surgeon, this time an orthopedic surgeon. At the time there was a turf battle going on between neurosurgeons and orthopedic surgeons about which speciality should be operating on the spine. That is one of, if not the main reason that the Spine Surgery Board was created. Today both groups are board certified spine surgeons.

The orthopedic surgeon looked at the test and kinda shook his head, looked a me and said, I don't understand why he didn't do a nerve decompression and then a fusion. Another opinion!!

What neither of them knew was that neither procedure would have worked because I had spinal cord nerve damage from the chymopapain injections and the other test they did. Hey believe it or not, at the time they were using contrast materials for mylograms that had "glycol ethylene" in them. In case you don't know what that is, it is the active ingrediant used in car antifreeze. So my life of unbearable pain would continue because that was 15 years ago. I am sitting here 25 years later wandering if I can even sit at this computer long enough to complete this post. However, that is not the worst part. There are several million people out there tonight living the same lives that I am living.