I want to thank everyone of you for all your good wishes, phone calls, Emails, PM's and cards, they were awesome and really make me feel good, and ty for brightening up my DW Debbi's outlook as she is scared beyond what anyone should endure.
I spent an hour yesterday with the neurosurgeon and he explained the long 6-11 hour surgery I am undertaking, with his strong, skillful hands and bright mind. He is a Columbia University undergraduate, Yale Med School, George Washington University and Stanford Residency in Neurosurgery, and I have complete confidence in his abilities.
I am having a full decompression, including freeing the crushed but salvageable nerves in the middle of my L 4-5 and L-5 S1, and it involves cutting out all the facet joints and ligaments, and then Dr. Dembner will perform a complete spinal fusion of the above vertebrae, using cages that look like rectangle erasers to replace the discs, and placing pedicles and screws and rods made of Titanium to create stability and assist the fusion of the bones. He will make sure that if there is any other troublesome areas nearby, they will be repaired as well. The biggest scare of spinal fusions are if the nerves have thick scar tissue, then I will be in a life long battle with chronic pain, but he feels that I have a great chance for a full recovery, as he saw minimal nerve scarring in all the tests I had. At the end of the surgery, he will shoot a large amount of morphine right into the spinal chord so that I will have 24 hours of minimal pain, considering the scope of the surgery. I will be wearing a beautiful, tight corset for 3 months, and have a bone growth stimulator to assist in the fusion of the bones. I have a positive, strong attitude, thanks to my family and to you, my dear RV'ing friends, and my motto will be manning up and staying tough.
I plan to keep this thread as updated as I can, and hope to be giving all my friends here the latest news in the next couple of weeks, depending on my condition. I will be the happiest man on Earth to stop taking all this morphine and pain meds, and all I can say is God Bless each and every one of you for caring so much about me, and encouraging me to get this horrible back condition repaired. Many of you are feeling similar pain as me, and I hope to be an example of positive thinking and complete recovery.
The truth is that when I had to turn around after 4 days on our RV summer trip, and return home with tears in my eyes and wishing that I was enjoying the Oregon rally, I was extremely upset and incredibly depressed. Then, all of a sudden the emails, and phone calls started coming in, encouraging me and making me feel like people really cared about me and it emotionally turned me around completely. So thanks everyone, you have made a difference in my life and I thank each and every one of you, and to let you know that you have a made a huge, positive difference in my life. My goal is to recover as quickly as possible and get out there and saddle up our RV and ride into the sunset.
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