Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Seven Percent

Here we go again.  Looks like I will be ringing in the new year with my third operation in eight months scheduled.  That's just crazy.  I met with my surgeon today who went over the MRI with me.  It's bad.  Even worse than last time he said.  The same disc has re-ruptured and is bulging even more than it did before the first surgery.  He said I'm one of the unlucky 7% that it happens to.  I always was an overachiever.

At first he mentioned physical therapy with spinal traction, but didn't think it would be effective based on the size of the bulge.  Surgically, he said I had two options.  One is to do the same procedure as last time... clean everything out and let it heal.  The second is to fuse the two vertebrae together so the disc wouldn't be an issue again.  The first would leave me with an increased risk of re-rupturing it once again, but it could also be just fine.  The other would cause more problems in the future like more back pain and the possibility of faster degeneration of the next disc up.  At my age, he recommended doing the first.  I agreed.

This just fucking sucks.  More work will be missed.  More money will be lost.  And I was really hoping that we'd get to start trying to conceive in the next couple of months.  So much for that.

I'm so frustrated right now.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

Meals and MRIs

Hello all!  It's been quite a while!  A lot has been going on as it always seems to during the holiday season.  We were prepping for some of the boyfriend's friends to join us for a few days over Thanksgiving and were a little frantic for a bit.  We had to finish the guest bathroom which had been taken apart for painting a couple of months ago.  I'm happy to say it turned out very nicely.  We also needed to declutter the rest of the house to make room for two adults, two little kiddos and their large dog.  The house looked amazing!  Then they didn't come.  They would have been driving through that snow storm that hit the east coast the Wednesday before and didn't want to risk their family's safety.  We were bummed, but it was the right decision.

So instead all of the boyfriend's local family came over for dinner!  I was freaking out about cooking everything, but it turned out amazing.  We prepped as much as we could the night before and the morning of, and the actual afternoon cooking went very smoothly.  We did a deep fried turkey for the first time, and it really was one of the best I've ever had.  The whole event was relaxed and all eight of us fit in our little house pretty well.  They brought over three bottles of wine and about two whole glasses were partaken of one, so I've had some nice evenings since then, haha.

I am so thankful that I love his family and they seem to love me!  They are all so wonderful and we get along well.  The conversation always flows easily, and I feel very comfortable around them all.  I loved my former in-laws very much, but I never felt like I could relax around them.  Maybe it's because they were my first experience with "meeting the parents" and I really didn't know how to act.  Me being all awkward in general anyways didn't help, I'm sure.  It is a great relief to know that my future in-laws are freakin fantastic.

But through all this holiday wonderfulness, there have been some troubles.  Mainly, my back.  Oh, my aching back.  Well, leg actually.  The sciatic pain returned for good about a month and a half ago and PT isn't helping anymore.  I met with my surgeon who ordered an MRI with contrast, which I had this past week.  It was pure torture.  I can't lie on my back for more than a minute without being in some pretty horrific pain, and the MRI required I be in that position for about half an hour.  I was in tears it was so awful.  But they said the images turned out great, so there's that.

I meet with the surgeon again week after next to discuss the results.  He said it could either be scar tissue from the back surgery or something could be going on with a disc again.  I'm so frustrated and tired of being in pain every fucking day.  Luckily I have lots of good pain pills left over from the surgeries this year and they're actually working now with no side effects.  I'm thankful for that.  I'm just really nervous to hear what's wrong.