Hooray for needles and Sharks' malaise

This is one of my favorite hockey cards, showing Owen Nolan and Ray Whitney back when both played for San Jose.

The good news is … I finally got my rhizotomy on my back! It’s not every day someone cheers about getting an IV started in a painful place and then six pokes in the back (which I of course didn’t feel, gorked out on Versed and Fentanyl and God-knows what else [there were three different meds]), but when I came to I knew the original pain was gone. The day I had the procedure, Monday March 2, was a miserable rainy day chock full of treacherous traffic in heavy rain. Naturally the rain wasn’t helping the pain one bit, but that’s what made this whole thing so remarkable—I walked out of the facility better than I walked in!

I’ve been sort of sore all week, but the pain is different than before, and getting more my “normal” kind of pain. The next thing I have to fight for with the comp carrier is for it to continue to pay for my pain medication. The comp carrier’s brilliant utilization review physician, who of course I’ve never met, thinks I shouldn’t need pain medication 20 years after the injury! WTF, he should try living through a two-level fusion and then say there is no reason to have pain! But I have faith in my back surgeon, he knows how to work the system well enough to get things done.

So the Sharks are starting their end-of-the-year slump. I had to laugh. I especially enjoy losses where one of the main characters on the opposing team are former Sharks, and that was the case with the Minnesota Wild and Owen Nolan. Owen is another of my favorite players, though I am scared to death of him. When I was writing for Hockeycorp and doing features with players like Teemu Selanne, Scott Hannan and Marco Sturm (my three all-time favorite players to interview!), Owen was still around, but had a notoriously bad attitude. After practices, media were allowed into the players’ locker room to do interviews. By the time we were let in, Owen’s gear was swinging in the breeze, and he was long gone. Hockeycorp wanted me to get Owen to sit down and do a feature on hunting, but Owen wouldn’t talk to anyone. No fun features with him!

Still, I do recall how much fun it was to go to a game when the Sharks were struggling, when a win was something to hoot and holler about, and being a female fanwank, cheering on what us girls called the “fine line,” which consisted of Owen, Ray Whitney and Jeff Friesen. Eye candy on the ice!

I guess we’ll see if Sharks coach Todd McLellan rights the ship tomorrow night against Vancouver. It’s just so much fun to read Sharks’ fan boards and how they blame the refs, blame the ice, but fail to blame the players who have obviously been reading too much positive press about how the Sharks are the team to beat. Calgary made huge moves at the trade deadline. I’m thinking they are the team to beat …

Four months of back attack is nearly over!

After dealing with a back attack that started around Halloween, I finally have an appointment for a bilateral two-level rhizotomy on March 2.

There are some laughable observations and errors in the comp physician's report that I need to have corrected, but luckily I have been a bit too busy to deal with that. But there are things that need correction—I did not hurt my back as a result of having a seizure, as in "I" had the seizure. It was an inmate that was found to be faking seizures that caused my injury as I tried to make sure he didn't suffer an injury. The comp doctor also thinks there is no reason I should still require pain medication nearly 20 years later, so he wants comp to stop paying for that too! I'm on the stuff I'm on because I had a bleeding gastric and duodenal ulcer in 2001 because of NSAID use. For me, there are too many side effects from this family of medications.

Medicine nowadays is a joke! That doctor has never met me, and he went off on a "drug addiction" tangent, listing signs of drug abuse. Good lord, I lost my sister due to a combination of prescription and illegal drug abuse. I'm sure as hell not going down that path!

Fortunately my surgeon is a level-headed guy who also knows how to work the worker's comp system.

Still, it angers me that people like me who have legit injuries are looked at as malingerers, while the story about the woman in Whittier who had the octuplets unfolds and it is revealed she's been getting comp disability benefits for nearly 10 years, and in that period of time she managed to have 14 kids! WTF?

More on her when I have the time.

well, good news with the back doctor

When you've had back problems for as long as I have, it's just nice to know what is going on sometimes and that something can be done and that you are not crazy in the head or making things up.

I saw my back doctor today. His name is James Reynolds, and he's part of a group that does nothing but state-of-the-art spine stuff. Period. He's been my doctor since eight months after my on-the-job injury at the Soledad Prison. It took me that long to get to him because I was trying to stay local (a big mistake if you are living in a rural area and there are no hotshot doctors who care about publishing and teaching other doctors about the complexities of the spine), but had been released to return to work when I couldn't stand up straight or barely walk.

You see, my diagnostic tests were "normal" in the local doctor's mind. I did not have a big nasty herniated disc that would explain the severity of my symptoms. So, no disc herniation = no problem, and my inability to do anything was malingering. I was referred to the prison's "official" comp doctor who immediately referred me to Spinecare, two hours north of where I lived.

Spinecare's head doctor, Dr. White, had recently operated on the SF 49er's Joe Montana. We know how well that one went. The doctor I was assigned had assisted Dr. White with Joe's surgery, so I knew I was in good hands.

Right off the bat Dr. Reynolds knew why my back hurt. I had dessicated discs, and they were leaking disc fluid onto my nerves. So rather than the pain being due to compression it was due to a chemical reaction. As part of one special but very painful x-ray procedure, I could clearly see what he meant by dessicated—the disc itself looked as if it had been scratched by a cat.

Two months after I found this doctor, I had my first surgery, a two-level laminectomy, which worked beautifully. But I messed it up two years later cleaning horse poo out of a stall. I then had a two-level fusion, fused front and back (nasty surgery!) and then 18 months later, had the hardware removed (a normal thing for that kind of surgery).

So I have had a good 16 years that I wouldn't have had if I hadn't found a doctor willing to think somewhat outside what was then the conventional way of thinking.

So what's wrong with me? Normal for someone who has been fused where I am. The vertebra immediately above the fused area (I'm fused at L4-5 and L5-S1) are not designed to bear the load they now must deal with because the area below is one big fused bunch of bone. So last year I had only one level that was problematic, at L3-4, on the right side. Now I'm at two levels, L3-4 and L2-3, and both sides. But because I had great results last year, there will be no need for diagnostic blocks; they will be able to go right to the offending areas and electrocute the offending nerve. The procedure is called a median branch neurotomy or rhizotomy. It doesn't hurt to have it done; the doctors give conscious sedation medication and not only do I not remember the procedure, it doesn't hurt at the time. It does hurt for about a week, then I am good to go again.

The doctor told me I can have this procedure done as often as I need, and now that I have an established pattern, I can expect about 11 1/2 months of a decent functioning back. And I guess the best thing is I never see a bill! Worker's comp is a pain, but I suppose one could argue I am lucky in that I was hurt when I was, under the old law. I have fewer games I need to play, but worker's comp doesn't move quickly on back procedures anymore.

I sure hope this can be done by Christmas. I want my life back!