brown7373

I appreciated the concern from a number of my as yet "unmet" friends on this site, and wanted to give you an update. I had my surgery last Friday at the University of Miami Neurosurgery Hospital. They removed the 2 loose and potentially fatal screws that were ready to fall out, or worse, tear into the colon or other surrounding organs. That went well. They then flipped me over and affixed 2 rods to to fuse the spine to the pelvis. Friday evening was pretty rough, and I am not ashamed to tell you I was screaming like a littlew girl from the pain, which wasn't being controlled with the morphine or demoral or what ever they were using. That type medication has never worked well for me, and causes severe nausea in addition to not working. Saturday morning, I had my surgeon swith me to Percocet, which they say is not as strong, but for me it worked wonders! By the afternoon, I was walking around the hospital without a walker, and feeling better than I have in over a year. The doctors want me to rest and do no bending, stretching, lifting etc. and will probably be able to begin getting back "slowly" in 8 to 12 weeks. I paln on douing as exactly as instructed, hoping for a 95% recovery rather than pushing too fast and getting maybe a 75% recovery at best.

I own a 70 Pontiac Bonneville Convertible, a 72 Chevy Cheyenne Pickup as well as my 72 Cutlass Supreme Convertible and belong to forums for all three. Without hesitation, I like the Olds Forum the best because it gives the best feedback and the least politics or personal nit picking that is sometimes overwhelming on some of the other forums. There are always numerous ways of looking at problems and questions we all have from time to time, and I really appreciate the way the Olds guys and gals handle the various topics and differences of approaches or opinions.

GREAT SITE! Let's keep it up.

citcapp

Good luck with your recovery. As you stated stick with the doctors recommendations and you will heal better and faster

Eddie Hansen

Glad to hear some good news.... I am one of the faceless ones wishing you a speedy recovery, and am a firm believer there are no strangers just friends I haven't met yet

Back pain is the worse... and I have no idea how you endured what you have, loose screws, rods being fused to your spine ( sounds like something our politicians need to do as they have no backbones LOL), with all that pain and suffering my god sounds like you were at the IRS instead of the hospital


anyway wishing you a speedy recovery

mfgusa

Yeah, us Olds guys are a special bunch allright.

My wife as well as two close friends have had severe back problems requiring surgury. From my experience, there is not much worse. Even my cousin who is my age and is expected to succumb to cancer next month, seems more capable of dealing with it than any of the aforementioned.

Maybe you can find a fifth blog to chat about your back.

cutlassgal

Glad to hear all went well! Hopefully you'll have a speedy recovery - little bit.... little bit!!

Lady72nRob71

Gladd all is going well for you - congrats on a success!
However, be very careful at what you do and do the recommended therapy just as the doc orders, even if there is some pain. I recovered well from mine years ago and it is all in the mindset. Keep focused and get well soon!

NorTown Olds

BEST wishes to continue your great recovery! HOPE you're back to all your normal activities in no time.

Willidog

God Bless and speedy recovery.

eds

Best of luck, and wish you the best.

To echo the above, by all means do not give in to the urge to resign yourself to the couch and recliner. Listen to your doctors and therapists, do the work, and you'll be back under those cars in no time!

Dave Siltman

I wish you a speedy recovery and may your pain subside. I kinda know where you are (were) in relation to back pain. I have a multitude of back issues and live every day in severe pain. I am prolonging surgery until the point where it is unbearable. At times, I feel like throwing in the towel and scheduling the surgery but I am still very uneasy about it. It sounds as though this latest surgery is a follow-up to an earlier one. It sure seems (to me anyway) that everyone I talk to that has had any kind of back surgery either still has pain or needs to have more operations. Good luck and keep us informed of your progress. Most people have NO IDEA what it is to live with chronic back pain, I'm SURE you do! Until next time..... Dave.

Jamesbo

Glad it went well. Speaking from experience.Do what the Doc says.

brown7373

You are correct Dave, about just living with the pain. Mine resulted from being reasr ended prety hard in December 1999. Over the next couple years I had my neck fused (one level) and both shoulders done (rotator cufs and torn labrums) with very good to near perfect success. I was advised by my neurosurgeon, also a long time friend, to wait on the lower back as long as posible, because uit was much more involved with a much lower success rate. I lived with constasnt pain helped but not cured with Vicodin. Constant pain is not an 8 to 10 on the 1-10 scale, but maybe only a 2-4 on that scale. On them surface, that sounds pretty mild and managable,. But when it persists 24/7, molnth after month, it winds up taking over most of your thought processes. When It got bad enough last year, I decided to go ahead with it. My surgery in November was not without a lot of problems, but I feeel confident that those issues were corected last weekend and I am looking forward to putting this far behind me. And yes, I plan to follow themdoctors orders to the T. Back problems are not something to mess around with. Tne back is the foundation for almost everything you do, including just sitting at a computer terminal typing some rambling thoughts.

Again, thanks for all your thoughts and input!

oldsguybry

God bless.... Im going through some woes of my own , I got these bumps on my fingers , elbows , knees that come and go... this is the second year they went and came back. This year there is one on the bottom of my heal , after I had a back blowout that plagued me for a month in a half , the bump started to hurt so I cant walk right now and now my back is killing me again. I blame my back woes to being a former painter , taking a spill down some stairs on my @ss , and all the dumb things I did when I was young.... like jumping off my moms house with a bmx bike.... the point is that im going to have to get an operation to remove the bump on my foot in order to walk normal , and then im gonna make a trip to the chiropractor for a final fix..... me and my family wish you a speedy recovery.

oldsguybry

Dave .... I dont know your story , but a doctor will always say surgery .... I dont think so Tim . If you have severe back injuries like a slipped disk or something more horrifying , then you have to do the surgury thing , but if its just a out of alignment vertibrae a chiropractor can re-align that for you and you will feel like a million dollars for waaaaay less then the surgeon will charge..... I never beleived in chiropractors , untill I went and that guy fixed me up so well , I did not have top come back for over four years.

Dave Siltman

I have bone-on-bone in two areas as a result of degenerating discs, a curvature, and two other "back diseases" that I'm not going to attempt to spell. The pain factor is usually "8-9" with a "10" being the worst. Sometimes, I really get disgusted and let it get me down and complain. Those are the times when I "consider" going under the knife. Believe me when I tell you, "It gets old". My wife is very understanding and will support whatever decision I make. At some point, surgery will be necessary as the MRIs and X-RAYs show I'm progressively getting worse. It is hard to explain to someone that doesn't experience or suffer from constant pain, but if you do, you know what I mean. The last time I visited the surgeon, my odds were 70% of 50% relief----to me, they aren't worth the gamble. I know what I can tolerate and medication makes it somewhat better. I have tried the shots, therapy, "you name it"; nothing really helps. I'm NOT whining, just telling like it is.

oldsguybry

omg , im so sorry to hear that ... I hope you decide to get that taken care of soon and that everything goes well.... the older we get the harder it will be. God bless

NevadaW30

Just read your post ooooooouch, there are lots of us out there my second operation was done in 2004 and I think the screws are from Ford

Aron Nance

Brown7373: Glad to hear of the successful surgery; by all means, heed the doctor's advice, and do exactly as they tell you. My son has chronic back pain and today told me he is strongly considering finally having surgery to correct. Will be a hard decision, and hope when he has it done it will be as successful as yours.

Dave Siltman

Aaron PLEASE I repeat PLEASE talk your son OUT of surgery unless it is his final option. Listen to what others are saying. It seems a very small percentage of surgery candidates have good stories to tell. Congrats to those who have been fortunate enough to have a positive outcome. I'm scared to let anyone with a knife near my back and I am in CONSTANT PAIN, but I can still do everything I want to do---I just HURT all the time. Once the surgery cycle is started there is no turning back---explore ALL the options.

junqueboi

Hey Dave..this is Joel from NC... glad the operation went well. Hopefully they used loctite on the screws this time. Prayers going up for a quick & complete recovery. It's hard to enjoy anything when you don't have your health.


By the way, I have been doing a major cleanup on the garage & think I found those power seat tracks for your Bonneville yesterday. I'll send you pics.

citcapp

Have you son try all options of physical therapy before doing surgery. See a sports injury doctor as well.

Lady72nRob71

And if surgery is the only option, find out if it can be done with minimally invasive procedures. The less they cut and disturb, the more successful it will be (if you have a good surgeon of course...)
I had one guy who wanted to go in through the front, pull my innards out, trim the disc, and dump everything back in. OUCH! I knew a guy who did that and the outcome was worse than what he started with.
I found a guy who went in through the back with micro instruments and trimmed the disc - I recovered very well!

brown7373

I kind of forgot about this thread for a few days and noticed a bunch of new replies. Again, I appreciate the outpouring of support and concern from friends I have not yet met! Great group to be associated with.This all started for me in 1999 when I was rear ended. For 2 years, I was seen by and treated by a variety of doctors including a couple different chiropractors. Initially my main problem was SEVERE headaches, caused by a damaged disk in my neck. I was on a variety of drugs, one of which I would take at bedtime because within 10 minutes, I would pass out. And nothing was helping. The drugs didn't make the pain stop, they just made me so numb I didn't care.

I began seeing a neurosurgeon who also happened to be a personal friend who I knew from our local AACA chapter. He isn't just any neurosurgeon, but was considered one of the best on the east coast. His appraoch for anyone has always been conservative, and he would tell you, he made plenty of money without forcing surgery on everyone who walked in his office. Anyway, after some mri's and other tests, he recomended removing the damaged disk in my neck, inserting a titanium cage to maintain the space and fuse the 2 vertebrae. I recovered as close to 100% as possible and couldn't imagine how it could have gone better.

But we also discussed my lower back that also had problems, and his advice was to wait, delay and put off as long as I could, maybe even forever. But, it would probably continue to deteriorate and I would be faced with living with constant pain, or get it addresed surgically. But even then, he advised how difficult and serious this surgery was, and how it's rate of success was nowhere near what my neck was, and in fact more often than not, might not even help.

I had a regular prescription for low dose Vicodin, that I took for years, for the most part, 2-3 pills per week. Usually I needed one after I'd work on a car or work around the house. By 2009 and into 2010, it was getting much worse. I was needing more and more pain killers and was needing higher doses. While I did still consult with my friend the neurosurgeon, he had retired from medicine, so he was not able to perform surgery, but he agreed, that I was probably at the point that I needed to try to fix it, or continue to live with increasing pain and increasing levels of drugs.

I could go on for hours with all the problems associated with the surgery, the complications, the possible incompetence or in the lack of attention and focus of the surgeon, but I won't bore you. Suffice to say, the surgeon has protected himself very well from possible lawsuits, and as a couple attorneys have advised me, even though it seems he is a "bad doctor", there is no way we can prove it.

My focus is not and has never been a law suit, but I sure hate to think he might continue to hurt others and there's not much I can do about it.
But the team of doctors at the University of Miami Hospital seem to have done a great job and I plan on following their orders and suggestions to the letter.

As I was being released from the hospital, one of the nurses reminded me, BLT. I got all excited, because I love bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches, and thought, how cool is this? Then she elaborated. No BENDING, LIFTING or TWISTING. Damn!