Birthday Ponderings

Last weekend, I helped build a picnic table, as part of a volunteer project at a local charter school. It was a monumental moment for me, not just because I've never built a picnic table before, but because it's something that I couldn't have done last year.

Today is my 30th birthday, which I guess is supposed to be one of those "landmark" birthdays where you're leaving the freedom of your 20s and entering adulthood. In many ways, this is a landmark birthday for me, but not because I am getting "old" and turning into a serious adult.

It is a landmark for me because today, sitting here writing this post, I feel about 30 years younger than I did on this day last year. On this day last year, I sat in the office of my wonderful neurosurgeon, Dr. Aldem Milam, at Orthocarolina, and made a huge decision. I decided to have major back surgery to fuse my L5-S1 vertabra. It's not a decision many 29-year-olds make.

Not quite three weeks later, I was walking into Presbyterian Orthopedic Hospital, so Dr. Milam and his staff could drill through my tailbone to the disc that had been causing me so much pain, scoop out the gelly innards, and replace that with a big bolt that extended between the two vertebra on other side of the disc. A couple more tiny screws in what's known as the facet joint, and they were all done.

A side note--It's worth mentioning that the day I was being converted to the bionic woman, George Clooney was doing a promo for his new movie, Leatherheads, at the train depot in Salisbury, where they had done some of the filming. They also filmed at my workplace, the N.C. Transportation Museum, and had I not been on the operating table, I would have been at the depot, meeting George.

Four weeks after the surgery, I returned to work. A few weeks later, I completed my physical therapy. At my three-month follow-up, I was informed that the joint was completely fused (meaning that "bolt and screw" operation that immobilized the joint had successfully resulted in the bones of the two vertabra "growing together" to form one solid, immobile piece of bone). Since there's no motion in the joint, it can't cause me pain. But I also can't touch my toes without bending my knees just a little. It's a small price to pay.

The road leading to surgery for me was a long one, starting two and half years earlier. It started as a pain in my calf, that was almost like a mild cramp, but wouldn't go away. I tried eating a lot of bananas, thinking maybe my potassium was low, and that was causing the constant cramp. Eventually I learned it was a tear in my disc that allowed the aforementioned gelly innards of the disc to leak out and irritate the nerve that ran past it and down my leg.

Getting a clear diagnosis of a back problem isn't easy, and I went through about two years of trigger point injections, epidural steroid injections, this electrical shock thing to test my nerve function, x-rays, MRIs, and even a procedure called a discogram where they did an injection into the disc to try to replicate the pain and determine if that was indeed the source of my pain. Another side note--when the doctor and staff spotted my tattoo as they were preparing me for this notoriously painful procedure, they joked about all the big tattooed guys that came in for a discogram then cried like babies when they were on the table. Very comforting indeed.

By the time we decided to go forward with surgery, the mild cramp in leg had grown into a constant pain down the back of my entire leg and most of my back, and I was taking 4-6 narcotic painkillers a day. I felt like I was at least twice my age. By nature, I am a happy, positive person. But people in chronic pain are not happy, positive people. I don't think I truly understood how deeply the pain had affected every aspect of my life until I was no longer in pain and I felt my old self returning. There have been a few, "oh, this is me, this is what I used to be like" moments along the way. It's hard to express how unbelievably grateful I am for my friends who stuck with me, even when I wasn't really me, and especially to Kevin, who saw my struggle from the closest vantage point of anyone.

But thanks to the support of those friends and the very talented medical personnel at OrthoCarolina and Presbyterian, today, on my 30th birthday, I feel my own age again. So I am not celebrating getting old. I am celebrating my youth. And to celebrate here are some of the things I can do today that I could not just one year ago:

* Give my dogs a bath.
* Take my dogs for a walk in the park.
* Sleep on my right side.
* Stand at a busy restaurant waiting for a table for more than 10 minutes.
* Stand in the kitchen long enough to cook a nice dinner.
* Go to the Y.
* Go to the mall with my friends and not bail out early.
* Make the long drive home to Pennsylvania.
* Pick up my niece and nephew and play with them (after I've made that long drive home).
* Build a picnic table. :)