Burned

Surgery: Part Duex (Part Une is here)

This time I made Chip come with me. (Although he spent the whole time setting his fantasty football teams. In fact, he was on the phone with Elijah talking aobut an injured player with the doctor came in.) We even took a picture like that other couple last time. Chip posted it to Facebook: "Brought her into the shop for repairs."

When the doctor came in to mark my back before the surgery, he asked if we had any questions. Chip knew less about the procedure, so he asked for a little more explanation on what exactly the doctor would be doing. The procedure is called a rhyzotomy, and it used to be a four-hour long, major, cut-your-back-open surgery. Now the doctor uses a long need to deliver an electrical current into the spinal joints and make "lesions" in those nerves. (He did three on me.) Over the next 18 days the lesion will cause the nerve to dissect and over the next eight weeks the two nerve endings slowly die off. The result is that the pain sensation transmission to the brain is severed.

The recovery time is eight weeks. A lot of soreness at first. Then he said I'll have good days and bad days. One day I might be all "Yay! This is great! It totally worked!" and the next day I might be like "Oh shit, this didn't work at all!" But he said the bad days wouldn't be acute, lay-me-out pain. It would be more like my old, regular chronic pain. And he said that the bad days will lessen in severity and occurence over the next two months.

The pain yesterday afternoon was pretty severe. Burnt nerves are angry nerves. They gave me a reigmen of pain cream, alleve, ice and heat to follow this week. This morning I'm mostly just really sore, so still hobbling. The measure of success here is if (when) I can walk upright.