Inside of me

About fifteen years ago or so I started feeling a little pain and tingling sensation in my right shoulder and arm. I didn't think much of it until I mentioned it to a friend who in turn mentioned it to his mother who was a nurse. She told him to tell me I should have it check out because it could be a blood clot. Having known someone who died of a blood clot when I was in junior high school, I thought that was good advice, and so I went to see my doctor. What it turned out to be was some sort of congenital defect in the make up of my cervical spine. At the tender age of twenty-eight I already had some fusion between two different sets of vertebrae, and some weird misalignment between two other sets. X-rays were taken of my neck, and my cervical vertebrae looked as if two freight trains had collided. It literally looked like a spiral staircase. I ended up in a neurosurgeon's office, and he told me that I would eventually need surgery to relieve the pressure from the nerves that passed through those vertebrae. He said that it didn't look bad enough to operate on yet, but that when it finally got to the point where I couldn't stand the pain any longer I should have it re-accessed.

That level of pain finally arrived early last year. It has still never been determined what exactly caused my neck bones to go haywire, but what I ended up with was full natural fusion of the second and third vertebrae, partial natural fusion between the sixth and seventh, prominent bulging of the discs between the forth and fifth, and the fifth and sixth vertebrae, a rather large bone spur at the fifth vertebrae, narrowing of the canal through my fifth and sixth vertebrae that the spinal cord runs through to the point of little or no spinal fluid around the spinal cord, and nerve damage to the nerve that runs to my right arm. This meant I was a prime candidate for anterior cervical discectomy with fusion, a complicated little surgery where the surgeon would come in through the front of my neck and try to fix what nature had so badly messed up.

I have no "before" pictures of what I just described, but below is an x-ray that was taken just weeks after the operation, and an MRI taken almost exactly a year after the operation. What looks like a big letter "E" in the x-ray is actually a bracket screwed into my vertebrae. Part of the operation entailed removing two of my discs, replacing them with bone plugs, and then bracketing it all together with that titanium plate you see in the x-ray.

The surgeon also scraped away some bone from the canal where my spinal cord goes through to make room for it and the protective spinal fluid. If you look closely at the photo of the MRI you can see where they indicated the second and third vertebrae. Notice that between the third and forth vertebrae there is still a narrowing of the spinal cord canal. If you look straight down from the number three written on the film, you will see what appears to be three dark slots ending with bright tips just to the right of the spinal cord. That is the same bracket you see in the x-ray. You can see that the canal for the spinal cord is still somewhat narrow through there, but believe me it is much better than it was.

After all that I still have pain.

Posted by Jeff at September 2, 2004 1:46 PM