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Back in 1997, as I left school for the summer, I ended up with a pretty acute case of mono, which forced me to have a couple of stints in the hospital. During the first case, the Detroit Red Wings won their first Stanley Cup since 1995 – I remember being extremely jealous of all of my friends who were out partying that night while I was hooked up to an IV.

Fast forward to 2008 – the Detroit Red Wings just won their 11th Stanley Cup! Which of course means I have a medical issue to deal with – my leg pain and back pain I have been discussing just isn’t getting better, and we need to ensure there’s no long term nerve damage in my foot or ankle from the nerve irritation. So after a couple doctor’s appointments (neurosurgeon and orthopedist) yesterday to get opinions, and a realization  that any more doctors were not going to give us a new non-surgical direction to try, we scheduled myself for a lumbar microdiscectomy on Wednesday, June 11th (time to be determined the day before), at Swedish Medical Center’s Neurological Science Center with the neurosurgeon (Dr. Peter Nora), to hopefully remove this pain from my back (literally!)

You can either have a neurosurgeon or an orthopedist do this; we feel more comfortable with the neurosurgeon, both personally, and professionally. As I’ve told people: “If someone is operating anywhere near my nerves, I’d rather it be someone who works on the brain, not the hand!” That said, this is reportedly, and I’ve done a bunch of research along with the doctor’s words, a fairly common, routine procedure – it is not the kind of “back surgery” you hear people so often discussing having lifetimes of issues, etc… Obviously, there’s no guarantees, but isn’t a metal rod implant, or a fusion, or anything overly scary – it takes about a half hour under the knife, and if I wanted, I could likely head home that day to start recovery. We are planning on having me stay the night for one night, just as a precaution, which the doctor recommended in any case.

Notes, including videos, descriptions, guides:

• Swedish Medical Center’s Spine Surgery Guide: http://www.swedish.org/body.cfm?id=547
  • Should be as they describe, other than we’ll only be there one night, not 4, as the procedures they are discussing are more intensive than I need.
• Good article describing the procedure: http://www.spine-health.com/treatment/back-surgery/microdiscectomy-microdecompression-spine-surgery
• Another good article on the procedure: http://www.esurgeon.com/scripts/content/treatmentoptions/back-lumbarmicrodiscectomy.html?doctor=nora
• Video of the procedure: http://www.esurgeon.com/scripts/content/playmovie.html?filename=discmicro&returnpath=treatmentoption/back-lumbarmicrodiscectomy.html&doctorname=Peter%20C%20Nora,%20MD&doctor=nora&page=back

Looking forward to getting healthy soon!