Life-Changing Back Surgery
I am a wife, a mother of 3 busy teenagers and a registered nurse with over 18 years nursing experience. One experience I could have easily lived without was severe back pain!
I had my first back surgery in 1995; an L5-S1 discectomy for a leaking disc done by Dr. Marcus Schmitz, an excellent neurosurgeon in Pensacola, FL. It helped to relieve the pain for several years.
In 2004, however, my back pain and leg pain had ascended to an excruciating level! It interfered with every aspect of my life. X-rays and an MRI confirmed that I had severe degenerative disc disease (DDD) between L3-L4 and L5-S1. The bones of L5-S1 were rubbing on each other every time I moved. The disc at that level was completely gone. Ouch!
My family doctor, Dr. Paul Pandolfi, gave me pain medicine, but that only dulled the pain and fogged my mind. Dr. Schmitz set me up for three sets of epidural injections, but they never relieved the pain at all. I began requiring a cane to walk safely and needed help climbing only 3 stairs to our church choir loft! I was barely able to function.
Dr. Schimitz told my husband, Don, and I, that he could operate but I would most likely require more surgery due to my young age and further degeneration. Instead, he recommended implanting a morphine pump into my spine. This, he explained, would "buy us time" for technology to catch up to my surgical need. The thought of a morphine pump in my spine was terrifying! After all, I was only 39 years old!
As a last resort, he recommended that we check out the clinical trials being performed with artificial discs. I called three medical centers from Texas, Chicago and Florida, but found out that I didn't qualify because I had several levels of damage. The trials only included patients with single level disease.
In this process, we found Stenum Orthopaedic Hospital in Bremen, Germany. Thank God!!
I studied Stenum's website, called their references and studied the website of another european hospital offering ADR surgery to Americans. I contacted Malte Petersen, the international medicine specialist at Stenum and he urged me to share my MRI with them. I did...
On a Thursday evening (CST) I emailed my MRI file to Malte at Stenum. The very next day I recieved an email stating that my MRI had been reviewed by the surgeons and they agreed that I would benefit from ADR surgery. They even gave me 3 surgical dates to choose from...
I was excited and nervous all at the same time. I took all my medical information to Drs. Pandolfi and Schmitz, and they agreed that Stenum had a great reputation and excellent surgical results. They gave our plan to go to Germany "two thumbs up!" So we started planning.
Our story continues at http://adrstenum.blogspot.com/
