Well I guess the beginning is the best place to start so here goes. The only way to understand the present is to start in the past.
In March of 2001 I was getting ready for work. I worked as a waitress at that time and so I was ironing my uniform. I remember that I was bent over the iron and then I twisted a little bit and couldn't move. I was frozen in so much pain I thought I would die. I lay on my bedroom floor for hours waiting till someone came home as I could not get to a phone. My father came home and found me in my room. As soon as he tried to move me and I screamed out in pain he knew that I was in trouble. I went to see an orthopedic surgeon who had treated my younger sister for a sports injury and I was told that I had severely sprained and strained my back. I was given some medicine for pain and medicine for muscle spasm. I was told to go to physical therapy and that was really hard. The pain got worse and then the numbness and burning in my legs told a different story. This wasn't just a strained back this was something else.
My doctor decided to order an MRI to take a closer look. I remember this day better than any day. I was sitting in the office with my Mom when the doctor came in. He had told us before hand that the worst case scenario would be a herniated or ruptured disc. He walked into the room looked my Mother and I in the eye and said that he had never seen this in someone my age. I didn't just have one herniated disc I had 4. I also had degenerative disc disease and spinal stenosis. He said that my MRI looked like one you would expect to see in a 60 year old person not someone who is 19. The next year was very hard. A lot of therapy and procedures that did nothing to help me some experimental and some not. I found a Neurosurgeon who suggested I go see a colleague of his in Annapolis. This led me to the man that would help me more than I ever thought possible.
Dr Thomas Ducker looked at my case and decided that he could and would help me. I was told I needed surgery to fix what was wrong. No amount of drugs and therapy was going to help I needed to have this operation. It was a multilevel laminectomy disc decompression. Basically going in and cutting off the herniated disc that was pressing on my nerves and making the spinal column wider to give me more room.In February of 2002 I had the operation. Almost 1 year since the problems started. The surgery was a success six weeks after I was better than ever and loving being back to normal. I was happy healthy got engaged to the love of my life a year later and we started planning our wedding.
Then comes the night of September 27th 2003. I decided to go out with a few of my girlfriends to a club in Baltimore, MD. We were having a great time I was the DD because I just wanted to dance and move. Around midnight the club went from basically empty to maximum capacity. You could barely move. I was standing off to the side watching the dance floor and my girlfriends were off getting another drink. I heard some commotion over to my right side and when I turned to look I was blindsided. Two bouncers had jump tackled a very large man and they all fell on top of me. Another employee of the bar ran over and pulled the men off me since they didn't know I was there. I knew I was in trouble again. I could barely move and had to be helped out of the club. Hindsight is always clearer and I should have been taken to the hospital right then but I was scared and just wanted to leave. I did go the next day and the news was not good I had re injured my back and then some. I also had a fractured tail-bone which was so painful.
I wasn't sure what to do so the first thought was to go back to my surgeon. He looked at my MRI's and determined that in his opinion I was not a candidate for surgery. I wasn't sure what to do since I knew that things were much worse this time. He suggested I try pain management and just learn to live with it. I did for a while. I took lots of drugs and went to therapy and nothing helped. I spent almost the entire year of 2004 in bed. The only thing that I had was a conversation that I had had with a Neuroradiologist who had mentioned something to me about disc replacement surgery. I hadn't heard of anything like that but I decided to look into it.
That is how I found the Dr's at the Virginia Spine Institute who would change my life in more ways than even I had imagined. I emailed the doctors about the surgery and set up appointment to go see them. At the first appointment I was told that I was not a candidate for the surgery since they only currently could do a one level replacement. I needed 4 and the US hadn't approved that yet. I was told however that I was an optimum candidate for a spinal fusion. I knew enough to know at that point that this was a big operation. The prognosis after surgery was a little scary. I would loose mobility and possibly always have pain on some level but I would be much better off than I was. This was June of 2004. I thought a lot about it and decided to go ahead with the operation.
However now there was another problem. I was having numbness and tingling in my arms and hands. A new symptom but serious enough that my doctor passed me to his colleague and more testing was done. As it turned out the accident was a lot worse than we thought because I also had a ruptured disc in my neck and that was causing me to have weakness and motor function loss in my hands. It was determined that I needed to have an operation on my neck before the lower back since it was more serious. In July of 2004 I had a one level cervical fusion with a laminectomy on 3 other levels. It took me a year to recover I was in the most pain of my life. Therapy was hard and I never thought I would be okay. 1 year and 3 months later I was back at the hospital for my lumbar fusion. October 2005 the doctors preformed my operation and 1 year after that I was back at work for the first time in 3 years. Everything was great again.
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