Well, some of you have probably noticed I haven’t been around as much lately. Reason, is I messed up my back - twice. The second injury paralyzed my left arm. This seemed pretty serious, so I finally (after being a total wimp about it for a while) decided to go in for surgery. My Neurosurgeon, Dr. Loyola, operated on me Saturday morning.
It required two complete operations, on two different parts of my cervical spine. One was a minimally invasive one from the front (bottom of my neck), the other required an 8 inch incision on my back. The front problem had trapped my ulnar nerve, paralyzing my hand and some of my arm. The other, turned my normally round spinal cord into something that looked like a kidney bean, and was scraping off a little tissue at a time from my spinal cord. The cord thing earned me a “you need this right now” from the doc.
This was some scary stuff now. You kind of need that cord intact for things like breathing, walking, crapping, etc.
So, despite just having all this done, I feel ok. Pretty doo-doo on painkillers now, but prior to operation they weren’t masking the pain at all, and I couldn’t sit and work at a computer for more than a few minutes at a time. I’m sitting here comfortable now, despite the surgery Will take a while to get my hand back, but I’m already able to move it a bit, and I think its on the way back. The cuts on my neck sure do look gnarly though.
I got the referral for this Doc from an anesthesiologist - I reasoned that someone watching all these docs operate would have pretty good clue on who was good and who wasn’t. This turned out to have been a great idea. Dr. Loyola did an awesome job on a difficult problem. And I’m still alive, nothing new paralyzed, and looks like I’ll be getting my hand back too. This guy is the man.
