My scoliosis surgery at age 14

This brilliant book (Back in Control) is a must read for anyone who lives with chronic pain, and for anyone whose life is affected by loving someone who has chronic pain.

I have lived with severe, chronic back pain, since a failed back surgery eighteen years ago. When I was 14 years-old I underwent surgery to correct scoliosis. Hardware was place in my thoracic spine (T6 to T12). Within a few short weeks following the surgery, I began experiencing an unusual amount of pain. My spine surgeon, Dr. A told me that the pain that I was experiencing was normal and that it would get better. The pain didn’t get better, in fact it got worse.

You’re a “chronic pain patient”

During the next eight months following my surgery, the pain became so intense that I couldn’t attend high school. Every time I returned to Dr. A to tell him how much pain I was in, he told me that the pain was not a function of the surgery; rather, I was a “chronic pain patient”. Operating under this assumption, I engaged in months of painful physical therapy, chiropractic treatments, and eventually I was referred to a chronic pain specialist, who put me on methadone to control my pain.

The spine surgery was infected

I eventually developed flu-like symptoms (vomiting, headaches, listlessness and high fevers) that didn’t remit. After eight months of dealing with ever worsening back pain, and repeatedly being dismissed by my surgeon, I went to a different spine surgeon for a second opinion. This surgeon was Dr. David Hanscom, and the year was 1995. Within a short time, he determined that it was likely that I had a staph infection in my spine. I was taken in for emergency surgery the next day to clear the infection. Dr. Hanscom was right, and so was I.

Fast forward to 2013… “The pain isn’t going away”

Just one week before my thirty-third birthday, I found myself unable to stand in an upright position – the muscles in my jaw, neck and back were in spasm; and I had a headache so severe that I felt nauseated. No amount of Ibuprofen, analgesic rub, or time laying on an icepack made a difference. I felt trapped and hopeless. Over the years, since my surgeries as an adolescent, I tried every alternative therapy known to man, and yet I still experienced pain on a daily basis. It finally hit me; my pain was not going to go away — it was getting worse. At the age of thirty-three, I felt like an eighty year-old woman. I thought that maybe another surgery would be my ticket out of the chronic pain hell that I had been living in for almost two decades. I had sworn to myself that I would never undergo another spine surgery, but I was at the end of my rope, and desperate for relief.

Stress?

Just before this pain flare-up, I had been dealing with a very difficult client at work. I could not control the trajectory of this issue, or the behaviors of my client; and coincidentally, my back pain was out of control. I had the sense that my back pain and stress with work were loosely connected. I was stressed with work, so it stood to reason that my muscles felt tense. I had no idea just how interconnected my back pain and stress levels actually were.

I have long thought that I had back pain because there was fundamentally something wrong with my spine. I have scoliosis, and had a corrective surgery that failed, and a traumatic experience post-op, with a spinal infection that went ignored, and could have killed me. I also experienced a great deal of anxiety since early childhood, and this anxiety increased in severity, as I got older.

Pain and anxiety are connected

Essentially, I deduced that I had two major issues in my life: back pain from a failed surgery, and anxiety and depression. What I know now is that these two issues are not independent of one another; rather they are one in the same.

It was by divine intervention that I learned about the work Dr. Hanscom is up to now. After visiting Dr. Hanscom’s website, I immediately ordered his book, Back In Control, and read it in two days. Once I finished his book, I signed up for the Hoffman Process, which is something you will learn about in his book. I then made an appointment with Dr. Hanscom, and was able to get in quickly because I was a patient of his eighteen years ago.

Hope

Back in Control blew me away, and it gave me a spark of hope. When I saw Dr. Hanscom in March of 2013, he told me that there was nothing wrong with my spine. Of course, I still had scoliosis, but my spine was solid. I was shocked to learn this! All of these years, I believed full-heartedly that my scoliosis and failed surgery was causing my pain; and for all of these years I was wrong. My pain was a function of pain pathways created by my central nervous system, post-surgery. Essentially, my pain was, practiced pain. This was a concept that was hard for me to grasp! But my faith and trust in the man who saved my life when I was young, helped keep me open to these new concepts.

Pain free!!

As I write this review, I have no back pain. This seems miraculous! The information provided in Back in Control, and my experience participating in the Hoffman Process, has radically changed my life in more ways than I could have ever imagined. I am so grateful!

Instead of my pain being constant, it comes in waves, and once I identify the pattern in my thinking that is the root of my pain, the pain goes away – completely. I used to have back pain 95% of the time, now I have back pain 15% of the time, and the numbers keep improving the longer I stay engaged in this work. Many days, I am pain-free. I don’t wake up with headaches anymore, I don’t grind my teeth at night, and I no longer take anxiety medication to get through my day. I simply don’t need it. I feel more alive than I can ever remember feeling, even pre-surgery. Many of the things that I have struggled with for years seemed to have vanished.

Be open to possibilities

My hope for you is that you read Back In Control, and consider going to the Hoffman Process. No one deserves to live in chronic pain. It tramples your quality of life, and negatively impacts the lives of those around you. Be open to the fact that the source of your pain is probably not what you think it is. We all deserve to be liberated in both mind and body. Living in pain is devastating and dehumanizing.

You are so much more than your physical pain, your psychological challenges, and your patterns.

The post Trapped for 18 Years from Scoliosis Surgery first appeared on Back in Control.

The post Trapped for 18 Years from Scoliosis Surgery appeared first on Back in Control.

Her second operation by me

I performed a successful disc excision and her leg pain quickly disappeared. I was relieved that she had not developed an infection from my operation. There is a higher risk of developing a post-operative infection if there has been a prior infection. She did well for about 3 months until she bent over to pick up a basket of laundry. Her disc re-ruptured at the same level and side. The size of this herniated disc was larger than the disc I had just taken out. There was not much choice except to take her back to surgery and remove it. During this period of time she was difficult. Her pain was challenging to control. She was understandably angry and demanding. I was in a perpetual battle with her over her needs for pain meds. Engaging in the DOC project was not of much interest to her. However, she did begin the exercise of writing down her thoughts and immediately throwing them away.

Ten days after her second operation, she came back to the office with extreme LBP, yelling at everyone at the top of her lungs. When I am dealing with a difficult patient, it is tricky to sort out who is really in pain and who is just trying to get more medications. However, my hunch was that there was something really wrong. Her disc operation had gotten infected and she developed a large abscess within the disc space and surgical site.

Her third and fourth surgeries by me

I had to perform surgery through her abdomen to clean out the infection from the front of her spine. A large bone graft was placed in the disc space to fuse it. A week later I went through her back to finish the fusion. She had now undergone six operations on her back within a span of two years. Her frustration kept climbing.

For weeks after her last operation, her anxiety was severe and the pain was uncontrollable. I had her labeled as “not having a chance of really getting better.”  Neither one of us was enjoying our interactions. Finally, after about six weeks, she began to calm down and I began to talk to her further about the DOC project. I still did not think she would engage in the tools and she had no access to a computer. But I never give up and she kept writing.

Not happy with me

On one of her follow up visits, I was about 30 minutes late. I was extremely busy and I didn’t think it was that much of a problem. When I walked into her exam room, she exploded at me, “I am really upset with you. I feel that when you are late that you are not respecting me.” She kept this up for a couple of minutes.

My historical response would have been to essentially walk out the room and ask her to come back when she was less upset. I just sat there for a minute and for a change I was able to listen. I saw her point. More importantly she had demonstrated a lot of courage to be clear with her surgeon. I looked at her and said, “This is a huge step. As I am the one in charge of getting you through a serious infection, speaking up was a courageous move. I am impressed.”

Her New Start

From that day on things changed. She began to write a lot more.  She read Feeling Good and started writing in the “three column” technique outlined by David Burns. Her mood began to improve. She re-established a relationship with her daughter and granddaughter. I continued to be impressed with the transformation of her personality and her pain levels kept dropping. I looked forward to seeing her back.

About four months ago, she plummeted while having some significant medical and relationship problems. She clearly saw the relationship between anger and increased pain but could not let things go. I was relentless and would not let her off the hook. She dove into Forgive for Good, which is the anchor book for Stage 2 about anger. Every visit was a struggle including figuring out her meds for her increased pain. About six weeks into it, she began to pull back out of her anger.

“I Am Not Letting Yesterday Ruin Today”

She came in one day beaming. She was active and off to see her granddaughter. She was in a new relationship that seemed promising. Her pain was minimal. I asked her, “What happened?” She replied that she figured out that whatever was in her past was over. There was absolutely nothing she could do to change it. She had made a decision, “I am not letting yesterday ruin today.”

It is one of the most concise descriptions I have heard regarding letting go and moving forward. I was inspired watching her regain control of her life.

The post “I Am Not Letting Yesterday Ruin Today” first appeared on Back in Control.

The post “I Am Not Letting Yesterday Ruin Today” appeared first on Back in Control.

Some clues

During my residency, I would often play pickup basketball on Sunday mornings. During my last year of orthopedic training, I started to notice my back going into severe spasms after a game. I would be stuck on my living room floor for about three or four hours after almost every game. The spasms would disappear and I would go on my way. I would not think much more about it. The pain would occasionally travel down the back of my left leg.

I had seen some patients admitted to the hospital for low back pain and ruptured discs. I could not understand their behavior. It did not seem possible that they could be having that much pain. They would often be very frustrated and become quite demanding. They wanted more pain control. My sympathy would diminish rapidly, as I became frustrated at being unable to easily keep them comfortable.

I had completed my orthopedic training in June of 1984. I spent the next six months doing extra training in orthopedic trauma at UC Davis in Sacramento. My plan was to work in private practice for six months in Oroville, California until my spinal deformity fellowship began in July of 1985. Things do not always go according to plan.

“Don’t wake a sleeping baby”

In March of 1985, I was placing my son Nick into his crib for a nap. We were spending the weekend with friends about two hours away from our home. As I leaned over the crib side rails to place him down, I felt a funny “giving away” sensation in my lower back. I did not experience any back pain. I immediately felt pain only in my left big toe. It was excruciating. I spent the next twelve hours glued to the hardware floor of my friend’s living room.

Contrary to my understanding of spine problems, my pain from the ruptured disc did not resolve. I did everything. I stayed in bed. I tried physical therapy. Somehow in my wisdom (doctors are terrible at treating themselves), I decided to take aspirin instead of narcotics. I took so many aspirin that I went into a type of kidney failure called diabetes insipidis. It is the type of kidney failure that causes you to urinate ten to twelve quarts of urine a day. The aspirin also caused multiple small ulcers in my stomach.

I couldn’t sleep. It was incredible to me that I would only sleep two or three hours per night, stay awake the whole next day, and still not be able to sleep the next night. The “make up” night of sleep never came. As I became more sleep-deprived, I became very frustrated and reactive. Not that a surgeon doesn’t already have a little bit of a start on that. 
I couldn’t eat. I completely lost my appetite and 25 pounds of weight. By the time I underwent surgery six weeks later, I was so nutritionally compromised that I developed a deep wound infection.

My surgery had been performed at L5-S1, which is the lowest level of the spine. I required a second operation to clean out the infection followed by six weeks of intravenous antibiotics. When my spine fellowship found out that I was infected, they hired another spine fellow. Not only was I not able to really pull my weight in my private practice, I had lost my job.

Understanding suffering

I had been in a dark hole several times in my life, but never one this deep or dark. I felt weak, tired, discouraged, and very unsure about my future. I understood the frustration of chronic pain. I understood how bad it could get. My perspective on my patients’ suffering changed almost instantly one night while sitting in my car. I was trying to figure out what to do next and essentially gave up. I felt completely enveloped in darkness.

My senior partner at the time covered most of my salary. I will be eternally grateful to him for that act of kindness. I cannot imagine what it would have been like without that backup. I was only at about one third capacity and certainly not coming close to covering my expenses. I realize most of my patients do not have that backup. My spine fellowship directors reconsidered the situation and re-hired me. I was lucky.

The post My Low Back Surgery–and Infection first appeared on Back in Control.

The post My Low Back Surgery–and Infection appeared first on Back in Control.