Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Backround

About 7 years ago, I awoke to numbness in my right index finger and allot of pain shooting down my right arm. At the time I had poor insurance so did what I could do manage the pain with ibuprofen and stretching. This did not give me much relief so I went to a medical doctor who proscribed predazone. This helped a bit, but only during the time that I was on the pills and never got rid of the numbness. This drug also makes you fidgety and I couldn't sleep very well. After a few years of just living with the pain, I had better insurance and went to a Chiropractor and also had message therapy. This seemed to take care of the problem for a little while, but eventually the pain and numbness came back. After this did not work, I thought I was stuck with just going to the Chiropractor every month or so, which I did, and never really solving anything. Finally in 2008, after working out very hard, the pain came back super strong and even several visits to the Chiropractor did not help. So, I was put on Vicoden for the pain and underwent spinal epidural steroid injections and also did many sessions of physical therapy. This seemed to help for a few weeks but again, the pain came back. An MRI and CT scan were done, and showed sever degeneration of the disc between C6 & C7, which has protruded out the disc area and blocked the nerve signals running down my right arm, which caused the pain and numbness. So on Monday April 13th I decided to have cervical spinal fusion on C6&C7. They harvested a bone from my hip and placed into the opening from the removed disc tissue and connected everything with a titanium plate and 4 screws.

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