Medicare Denies ProDisc Coverage

From today's Times: This is not good news.

"How'm I doin'?"

Shame on me for not updating, but I've got a good reason; I've been busy doing other things rather than obsessing about my back!

So I'm seeing a physical therapist for the stabbing, tearing pain in the middle of my upper back. It was most likely brought on by me trying to overdo everything cause I just felt so good and ready to try to stretch and work out like I normally do, well, like I normally did almost a year and a half ago. Swimming, which is supposed to be so good, probably should have been done with a bit more restraint than I went for it, but say la vee.

The PT mostly just massages the region around where the pain originates. It's all 'crunchy' cause there are so many knots in the muscles. This isn't a relaxing massage, either, folks. She puts some real elbow grease into it and I'm usually sore just from the rubbing, but I know it's good sore cause it means that blood and oxygen are getting to the muscles that need it. Then I do some light, very light, exercises for that region, and what do you know? It's getting better. When I go back for my post-op visit in June it will be six months and that's when Theresa says they usually start the PT for the lower back, the area that was actually most affected by the surgery, even though what I'm experiencing with my upper back is a result of my whole skeletal structure being shifted around. This Friday will be five months to the day since the surgery, we'll see how I'm doing then.

Abdominal Incision 12 weeks

OK, still not looking too much better, but they say it needs three months to work fully. Wouldn't it look better in three months anyway? It seems that this is similar to Groundhog Day (the day, not the movie), in that if the ground hog sees his shadow it's six more weeks of winter, and if not it will be an early spring. Well, how much earlier can spring come than the second week of March, which is six weeks from Groundhog Day? It's the same thing in my book. Anyway, I digress, but only because I'm just not too excited about the results from the Neosporin Scar Solution so far. I'm hoping that there will be a big improvement all of a sudden in the next few weeks because as you can see in the picture, I bought a two piece bathing suit! It's a TYR fitness suit and it's going to be great for swimming laps. It fits great and I was having a real problem with the one pieces; my torso is longer by at least a quarter to a half an inch, so all the suits that fit my hips were digging into my shoulders because they were too short for me. So I'll be flaunting my scars at the London Terrace pool, I hope no one is squeamish!

Comic relief

At first glance, this xray doesn't look too much different fromt this one, but if you look closely, you can see that the fused area is filling in a bit more with bone.

That's good.

Right after I was shown into an exam room, one of the interns came in to see me. Last visit Dr. B. brought this kid in to see my progress and introduced him, saying that he had "scrubbed in" on my surgery. (Thanks to Grey's Anatomy, I now know what that means.) So this kid (I kid you not, he was like 12 years old) comes in and asks me a bunch of questions about pain, activities, etc. He examined the scars and said they looked "good," whatever that means, and took some notes. I asked him about the slight sciatica feeling pain I was getting when I lean forward sometimes and his answer was basically, don't lean forward like that. *rim shot* Who is this guy, Jackie Vernon?

Dr. Balderston came in a few minutes later and said it looked "absolutely beautiful," and was healing exactly as it should, which of course is great to hear. I joked with him that usually when someone says I look beautiful, they are looking at my face, but I'd take the compliment however it came. He joked back (unusual for him, he's usually all business)that for him, face, back, whatever, it was all the same. It felt so good to joke around with him, after all the seriousness in the past year or so. What a relief! I'm now allowed to start swimming again, and can use any of the elliptical machines in the gym, as well as the stationary bike. This will give some much needed variety to my workouts, and help to redevelop my leg muscles. I still can't believe how much walking still hurts my legs (and feet!).

My next follow up appointment isn't until June (three months from now!) and I joked to Dr. Balderston that if at the three month follow up had the intern coming in first, I wondered who would be coming at the six month visit, the janitor? *rim shot*

But seriously folks, everything is going just like it should, and that's no joke!

Ain't Technology Grand?

I'm looking good!
Or so Dr. Balderston says. He pulled the remainder of the surgical tape off the abdominal incision and it doesn't look as bad as I thought it would. He says it's still somewhat swollen, and I can attest to the fact that it is still very sore to the touch. Those red marks on the sides are bruises from when the surgical tape was on and I had the distention problem, causing blisters to form under the tape. Ugh.
He was really impressed with my walking regimen, but didn't give me permission to do anything more than that at least until I see him again in another six weeks. I am allowed to begin doing some upper body work, mostly arms and shoulders (no lat pulldowns, chest or pec work for now), with five pound weights (he started at three pounds, but I got him up to five, ha!). I'm also allowed to start moving my body into different positions, like mild twisting, and I'm permitted to lift and carry up to fifteen pounds. But no bending yet.

I asked him about my still throbbing legs, he said it will go away as I become more used to walking upright (ha, soon I'll be using tools just like a human!). Apparently all my feverish stationary bicycle riding and swimming don't use the same muscles as good old-fashioned walking.





As you can see from the xrays, (click on the images to see them larger)he didn't take out the old rods; there was so much bone grown over them that he said it would have been a much more painful recovery for me. What they did do was cut the rods and reposition them so that my shoulders and thoracic region are now above my pelvis, and not pitching forward (compare to this). The first little red arrow in the xray on the right is where they cut the rod, the second points out the L3-4 fusion with small metal cage and screw, the third arrow points to the ProDisc at L5-S1.

Ain't technology grand?

Progress, maybe

Since I'm not allowed to do any exercise other than walk, I've been really trying to make the most of that. I've been going on increasingly longer walks everyday (Tony is upset that I don't take him along!), beginning with just walking around the hallways in my building and now including strolls around my Chelsea neighborhood. These latter outings are usually under the guise of running some errand, like picking up some fruit, dropping books off at the library, or buying a magazine or small treat for myself (croissants from Breadstix Cafe) while I'm out.

Yesterday I walked over the West Side Highway, up to 27th Street (when it started snowing!), back over to 10th Avenue, down to 23rd Street, up to 9th Avenue and then cut through my building for the last block cause I was freezing my ankles off in my capri sweats.

Today, since my long-frozen membership at NYSC has finally been unfrozen (I'd been working out at the London Terrace gym until just before I went into the hospital, it was much, much closer to home), and since I didn't feel like freezing my ankles again, I walked the two long blocks over to NYSC at 8th Ave. Once there, I walked a mile on the treadmill, then walked home with a small bag of fruit. My butt and legs have been sore since Tyler and I walked over to Bed Bath and Beyond on Sunday (four crosstown blocks from our apt., my farthest walk yet!) and took a cab back home (when I realized with a start of horror that I wasn't supposed to be in a car, but by then we were almost home, incident-free, thankfully).

Still, I've kept up with the walking every day this week. The soreness feels good; it's a different kind of achiness, a different kind of pain. This pain is from use, from increasing strength. It feels good. I'll let you know tomorrow if it still feels good, but whether it does or not, I'm still going to walk. Maybe just not as far.

Do The Twist

Here I am in my "bone growth stimulator." It sounds like a lot of hocus pocus; supposedly this apparatus (like having two picture frames strapped to my body) is supposed to send out micro-pulses that stimulate bone growth, helping the fusion to heal. OK. Hey they gave it to me in the hospital, so I'm using it.

It can't heal soon enough for me.

I'm not allowed to bend at the waist; if I want to pick something up off the floor, I have to squat down, plie-ing like a ballerina. An aching, sore, awkward ballerina trying to pick up her damn ugly-azz slippies (even my doctor made fun of them in the hospital, but they're so comfortable and they were only 7 dollars!) off the floor.

I'm not allowed to twist, even though I've woken up a few times in the night with my hips facing a different direction from my chest. I just now noticed that I'm kind of twisting in the photo above. It's hard not to twist.

I'm not allowed to pick up or carry anything over 10 pounds, though as I said before, anything more than a cup of tea or a book feels like a ton. And twisting and lifting and carrying is strictly verboten. Like something as simple as picking a dish up from the table and turning my body toward the kitchen with the dish in my hand is not allowed.

I can't swim, obviously due to the incisions mostly, but also because the weightlessness of the water, the thing that made me feel so good before, is now not my friend. I could overexert and snap a still healing muscle in a snap.

My recovery time would be much, much shorter if I had only had the ADR, but because I also had a fusion in two of the vertebrae, the healing and recovery will take months. At least it isn't as bad as when I had the first fusion for scoliosis 20 years ago. Then I had to wear an uncomfortable plastic "brace" (read: body cast) for six months. It was sweaty and at times unbearable. I had to wear a tshirt next to my skin under the brace, and anytime I went out of the house I had to carry a fresh tshirt and a plastic bag with me, ducking into the ladies room of whereever I was to take off my dripping wet sweaty tshirt, put it in the plastic bag (PU!), put the fresh shirt on and dry off the brace on the inside and put it back on. Then put whatever baggy shirt I was wearing over it all back on. Sometimes I'd need two clean shirts with me if I was going to be out for a while, and this wasn't even summer, it was October, November, December.

As much as I don't miss that, I do kind of miss the brace. Everytime I step out on the sidewalk now, I'm in fear. Fear of someone smacking into me, of tripping, of those damn delivery guys racing down the sidewalk on bikes, bags of food swinging like maces off the handlebars. Also, it would keep me from moving improperly, like the mindless twisting I do about a hundred times a day, like I'm twisting in the photo above. Not good.

What I can do is walk. And I do it everyday, either outside, in fear, or inside. We are so lucky to live in a huge building, an entire city block. We've got long interconnected hallways on the first floor so I can stroll around in my pjs and slippies and get my exercise without going out.

I've got my first follow up with Balderston on the 19th of this month and I'm hoping he'll give me the go-ahead to do more than walk then. But, I still may not be doing The Twist anytime soon.

Nil per os

I ended up with just one ProDisc and the other two bad discs fused. I'm very disappointed in this result, I really, really, wanted the three discs, but aside from this, I'm doing pretty darn good.

The first few days after surgery weren't so good. I was out of it and in a lot of pain, and then they gave me morphine even though I told them not to. The morning after the procedure I woke up to see my doctor standing next to me with, like, a seven thousand dollar suit a big smile and told him if he didn't want puke on his pants, he needed to step back. The whole side of the bed and me were soaked with puke. It was in my hair, everywhere. I heard Theresa say, "oh, why'd they give her morphine? She gets sick on that." Why indeed? I told the anesthesiologist and anyone would would listen that anasthesia and morhine make me vomit. How is it they don't share this information? Or remember it?

The days after that and leading up to yesterday were pretty much run of the mill post-op days: me out of it and getting ignored by nurses. I sometimes wonder why people with absolutely no compassion or aptitude for working with people go into health care.

Today was the first day I felt coherent in any way. I have some kind of condition or complication called "ileus" which occured as a result of my internal orgrans being moved all around during the surgery. The remedy for this is, of course, to pass gas. I've never had so many people so interested in my farts. Every doctor, nurse, intern and nurse's aide that's come by here since the surgery has asked (sometimes more than once) if I'm "passing any gas?"
They say that average person passes gas around 15-20 times a day. Talk about taking something for granted. I'm up to maybe four times a day and each time, it's a real event. I've been up walking around the floor here, getting my own ice chips, etc. in an attempt to get my sluggish bowels moving, but it's unfortunately a very slow progress.

Yesterday I had the singular indignity of having a tube inserted in my nose, down my throat and into my stomach to try to "decompress" my abdomen. So on top of everything else, I had to sit here watching blackish blood and greenish slime being pumped out of my guts through my nose. I actually asked , no demanded that this be done because my stomach was so distended my skin felt like it was going to snap, this is a very weird feeling. The nurses were saying they could have bounced a quarter off my belly. I was dosed up with drugs, fell asleep and pulled the tube out. Thank god they said they didn't want to put it back in. The canister with the yucky guts stuff in it is still hanging on a hook on the wall. I've had three sets of xrays, called "obstruction series" looking for what was in there. I overheard one of the doctors say it was a dilated loop, so apparently it is just several giant gas bubbles.

It's been seven days now that I haven't eaten. I'm allowed to chew/suck on ice chips but that's it. I've been fantasizing about what I want to eat when I 'm allowed, and it isn't even the elaborate steak or lobster dinner that most people might crave, I'm thinking about everyday little things like Triscuits, some raisins, maybe a handful of almonds, and hot cup of strong tea. Oh, yeah, pretty darn good.