Lesson Learned

Read the last two blog entries so this one will make sense.

I am my own best doctor. Well, maybe not a licensed physician, but for sure the best option for my closest medical advisor... at least a key member of my medical team. I knew for years that whatever the doctors were prescribing for my neck pain did not work. Yet I deferred to the doctors' incompetent advice and did not insist on an MRI. I had the best information on the location, description, severity and initiators of the pain but allowed my doctors to impose their inaccurate diagnosis and followed their improper advice for pain management.

It never made sense to me. It still doesn't. The program that the doctors prescribed failed to work. They kept promising that it would. I knew it would not. I was right. They were wrong.

Lesson learned. Do not accept your doctor's diagnosis if you feel that it is wrong. Get a second or third opinion. Know your body; and the best way to get to know your body is to use it intensely. An exercise program accomplish this. Look at and feel your muscles. Test your strength. Observe your body. Know how it looks and feels. Take what you learn from this and use it. Because you are the most important member of your team, insist on doing what makes sense to you.

In my case, I underwent years of unnecessary pain and experienced several weeks I would not wish on anyone. (See my last two blogs.)

Yes. Lesson learned.

My life is back...

Through luck or divine intervention, I ended up at Hospital for Special Surgery in Dr. Todd Albert's office hoping that my pain in the neck was the source of my quasi-paralysis. Dr. Albert is chief of surgery and coincidentally, a former classmate of my wife's brother, also a doctor. There cannot be a more thorough screening of patients than that of HSS and Dr. Albert's staff must be the best of the best at HSS. That team zeroed in to my condition in one day and I was scheduled for spine surgery  two weeks from my first phone call to their office. Think of that response to something that had been undiagnosed by my other doctors for years.

The HSS surgery by Dr. Todd Albert repaired a "severe compression" of my spinal cord in my neck. That was three days ago and I am now free of those life-changing symptoms and quickly recovering from the knife. They say I have to take it slow for a couple of weeks. I did 60 minutes on my exercise bike this afternoon. It's pretty nice to have my life back. 

Nightmare in New York

Wow! So much has transpired since my last post just after it was decided that I would not yet benefit enough from deep brain surgery. Shortly after that, my body started acting bizarrely with sudden weakness and numbness in arms, legs and hands. Then it accelerated to partial paralysis, tingling sensation in my limbs and severe pain in my neck. And the last point gave me a clue that I hoped would be a clue to what was happening to me. I thought that my chronic neck pain was somehow related to the rest of my deterioration. That was my hope since the alternatives were probably not curable and the neck at least might be. I had been treating the neck pain with physical therapy and a epidural steroid shot at the advice of the doctors at a pain management doctor group. Very unfortunately, they failed to diagnose correctly which would have concluded that a severe compression of my spine in my neck was the source of the problem. All of this nightmare could have been avoided. They repeatedly told me that they could fix my neck pain with therapy despite the fact that I had tried therapy for over two years. Then again, they sell pain management services.

Next post will explain what happened next.