E-mail I just sent to work:
“Hey All…
Just a quick update on my status.
Recovery is continuing to go well, and I am now able to sit long enough to make it worthwhile to start working from home again (so I can work from both chair and laying flat as needed, as too much sitting is still not good for me). Trust me, I am getting bored not working :)
As such, my plan is:
1) I am going to come into office for an hour this morning to catch up with everyone, and to figure out where all of the projects are at (so I know where to focus on for working from home)
2) I’ll be working from home starting today, until at least July 8th (next Tuesday), when I have my one-month followup with the neurosurgeon. I’ll know more about my medical clearance to work from office once I meet with him.
3) I’ll be available via phone and email while I am at home. Feel free to call me for anything needed and to call me into any meetings I am needed at.See you this morning!
- Aaron”
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While most of the time has been spent laying flat, reading, and watching TV, there has been a few activities over the past few weeks…
And yes, you can also call this post: Aaron is clearing out his camera from old pictures!
(As always, click on the pictures for larger versions)
- We’ve been wanting to get a fence put into the front yard - it makes the outside of the house enclosed, so if we are BBQing, doing yard work, or just reading and enjoying outside, Molly can now be with us. So we hired some folks (clearly, I couldn’t do it myself, with or without the back condition) to put in our cliche white picket fence - very white indeed until it starts raining again!
- Joelle finally found planters she likes, and put them out on the front porch:
- Molly bought me a book on Macaroni and Cheese for Father’s Day, so of course, I immediately wanted Joelle and my mother to make me one of the dishes - asparagus macaroni gratin. Fantastic, albeit a little heavy, was the universal agreement. Perhaps better as a side dish so you don’t try to eat too much of it.
- Got a Get Well Soon cookie from some really nice friends - overnighted from New Jersey, OU-certified and everything:
- My mother bought Molly a necklace thing from the Edmonds Art Fair (she went with my sister). I am not one to know these things, but everyone commented on how pretty she was with it on - on her end, at least she didn’t mind it the one time she wore it!
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Recovery has gone very well so far - having Joelle, my mother, and my sister to take care of things makes it really easy! I’ve been resting, laying flat on my back (or occasionally, on my side) for most of the time, with occasional walking around. Most importantly, no pain pills since Friday. I am still taking it very easy, and plan on taking a while more off from work, per doctor’s orders. If I start working at all, I (as most patients do, so my doctor warned me) know I’ll push myself too much, making the chance of re-herniation much more likely, which would be very bad.
Walking has been going real well so far - I can do about a half-hour before tiring out and needing to come home and rest. I can sit for about 10-15 minutes, but then need to stop. That’s mostly due to the incision though - once the stitches come out on Thursday, it should be much better.
I’ve also been doing a ton of reading - so might as well post my recent reading lists, as I have done in the past. What I’ve read:
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- Dog Lover’s Companion to the Pacific Northwest (library)
- Wry Martini’s (library)
- How to Raise a Jewish Dog (funny gift - thanks!)
- The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong (library)
- 2 Economist magazines
- Northwest Brewing News magazine
- The Stranger news-weekly
- Seattle Weekly
- Lots of web-pages - especially checking out http://www.howcast.com more and http://www.spine-health.com
- Surprisingly little TV. That said, watched a bunch of golf yesterday, and today, since I am laying in bed, happily watching the US Open Playoff WebCast (free, yeah!)
Next on reading list:
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- Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World (gift again - been wanting to read this)
- Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (library)
- Any other suggestions?
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As those of you following my Facebook status updates know, surgery went very well (the main back/leg pain is gone - albeit with a new back pain from the surgery itself), and I am back from the hospital, and well on the path to recovery (walking a little, sitting a small bit, resting a ton). I’ll write more later when it is more comfortable to be on a computer, but just wanted to pass along the latest updates in case I haven’t had a chance to talk to you in person.
And for everyone who has passed along good wishes - thanks! it means a lot to me to hear from everyone :)
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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!
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<Warning: Anatomy Images ahead - stop reading if you don’t like seeing them - not really graphic though>
My leg pain is getting a bit better, day by day - I was actually able to walk around for about 25 minutes yesterday, along with handling a short car ride. Go steroids go! (albeit, I still can’t feel my foot at all, but I can only ask for so much, can I?). The plan is to be in the office for the first time, in a while, tomorrow. We’ll see how that goes - hopefully, I pass with flying colors. That will make me feel much better, or at least, normal!
As part of this process, I had an MRI done last Friday for 2 purposes. One was to confirm the diagnosis of the ruptured disc. The second was to provide good visuals for the radiologists who performed the epidural on me last Thursday. (For more on that, see my previous post: http://averbuch.net/2008/05/07/nervous-system-updated-and-out-of-whack/)
Since I had the MRI done at a different facility than the epidural (or my orthopedist) due to time efficiency, I was given a CD of the results to carry from place to place (doctor’s prefer to see the actual images over faxed copies, obviously). Joelle, who has never been trained on MRI reading but has much better knowledge on anatomy than I do, took a look through all of the images for me this morning and pointed out a couple that show the disc issue quite well. In the name of “there’s no privacy on the internet anymore”, I figured I might as well post them for people to see :)
A couple of notes while you are looking at my back:
- The MRI makes the body look so cartoony. It’s sort of funny looking.
- I circled the key parts in Red in both pictures.
- Click on the pictures to see the images larger.
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| Notice the bulging disc sticking out from the vertebrae and hitting the spinal cord. That’s my current “resting state” - even that’s not good. If you notice the other discs, they are all normally-placed - it is the one that is causing me issues. | Here’s a great shot of a “pain” period. Pretty clear that the disc is hitting spinal cord and the nerves. Ouch :) |
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A couple key updates on things - one involving my nervous system, and one involving the nervous system of the house
- One of the projects we had in mind when we purchased the house was to update the electricity to modern standards; our home inspector had told us that we had nothing to worry about, but we were still about 20-25% knob and tube electricity (basically the old electricity used prior to 1930). Researching online, it’s actually relatively safe, but has a couple of problems:
- Insurance companies don’t love it; it has a theoretical possibility of burning down if rats, etc… eat through the wiring (or if amateurs do poor repairs). Many won’t cover houses with Knob and Tube. We were able to find a bunch of companies that did, but we ended up with a company who asked us to promise that “over time” we’d clean up the electricity. Technically we did that even prior to this work - we had some general electrical cleanup done right away (paid for by sellers inspection money), and they replaced some of wires with newer, romax, wiring. But now it’s all gone, so insurance won’t be a problem in the future.
- By code, you can’t put in new insulation on top of Knob and Tube - that’s a definite fire hazard. After seeing our gas bills for this winter, and knowing that Puget Sound Energy would cover much of the insulation work as part of their weatherization rebate program, I really wanted to beef up our attic insulation and install wall insulation on our main floor (there is none now). To do that, first though, we needed to get rid of the old wiring.
- It doesn’t have a grounding wire, which isn’t good for computers, as they discharge static electricity through the ground wire… We were fine, as we just use some of the plugs that had been updated, but now we can use any of the plugs in the house :)
- So now we are all up to date and good to go; the insulation work is scheduled to be done next week (it was supposed to be this week, but delayed due to my back issues….)
- My nervous system - that’s a different issue - I alluded to it in the previous post on dog parks - it’s impacted my ability to walk more than a couple of minutes, but should heal completely at some point. Can’t wait until this gets better!
- This all started about a month ago, with some pretty acute back pain and left leg pain. After seeing my doctor, following his advice on ibuprofen and physical therapy, then steroids and lay-on-the-floor-rest, nothing was making it better - in fact, the pain moved to my right leg pretty strongly, and my right foot went numb - I haven’t felt it in a week! I saw a few other people (chiropractor, a new general physician, taking an MRI), and finally, an orthopedic specialist.
- Turns out, I have a ruptured (or herniated) disc in my lower back, which is pinching a nerve, causing sciatica (and thus, leg and foot weakness and tingling) which has been pretty annoying to have - I miss feeling my pinky toe :)
- Next step, along with more rest and vicodin to relieve pain, is to get an epidural steroid injection (another good info sheet can be found here) on Thursday, hoping this helps… the goal is to release pressure on the back, and hope that the disc starts to heal. Often, people feel better within 3 days - praying this is true!
- Things I have learned:
- Working from home is productive and useful for a day or two. After a couple of days, it’s really hard to keep up with what’s going on in the office as so much occurs outside the scope of emails (and phone calls are hard to hold too many meetings by…)
- Everyone at work has been super great with everything. thanks all!
- I need more minutes on my cell phone plan (or else get a home phone - we are considering T-Mobile’s Talk Forever service, as we have T-Mobile’s family plan for our cell service). Given the amount of calls to work and to doctors, we’re running out of our monthly allotment!
- First time I’ve ever called into the on-call doctor over a weekend (as opposed to going into ER). They got back to us pretty quickly to get us vicodin, which was great. What was funny was that since my (new) general family doctor is part of a family clinic that serves both adults and children, they sent my request over to an adult physician and to Children’s Hospital. So we got a call back from a doctor at Children’s at first, and she stated: “I don’t know how to help you. You’re 29!”
Luckily, the adult physician also called back and was able to get me the pain-meds I needed! - There is very little good on television, no matter how many channels we get!
- I have a temporary disabled parking permit - haven’t actually used it too much yet, but it’s helpful - of course, since I can’t drive right now, it is just as easy to have Joelle drop me off at the door and park in a standard spot, but it’s a nice fallback to have in case we need to go anywhere.
- Passover seders are a lot tougher when you have to stand up the whole time! (sitting hurts…)
- Joelle is fantastic - nothing new here - but she’s taken care of everything for me (and for Molly) this past month - it has been a lot of work, I know. Thank you honey!
- Working from home is productive and useful for a day or two. After a couple of days, it’s really hard to keep up with what’s going on in the office as so much occurs outside the scope of emails (and phone calls are hard to hold too many meetings by…)