Microdiscectomy?

So, I run the risk of having this posted deleted by admin (admin note: Shawn, I love your posts...I just couldn't delete this), but it's something on my mind and I thought I'd share it here. As many of you know, I've had an ongoing back problem for which I underwent surgery on March 7, 2007. Now I'm staring at the ceiling thinking on the sixth day since the surgery and I wondered how I could do something constructive. What could be better than a blog posting about my career as an engineer and how it contributed to a drastic corrective measure such as a Microdiscectomy?

I'm going to leave the vast majority of this posting behind the 'more' button below so as not to clutter up the blog for everybody else. I think there's some relevance in telling a story like this because I don't think I'm too different from any other youngster trying to get into the field. And no, I never ACTUALLY p***ed my pants from this. Now you have to read the whole thing to know what I'm talking about!

I'll start this with the story that I've found myself telling a thousand times over the last year. It's the story of how I ended up slumped over like a 90-year old arthritis patient who leans to the left like Igor. I looked like a bent bicycle going down the road and people have stopped me randomly just to ask if I needed any help!

So here's the story:

I started working at a great studio back in the mid-90's called The Work Station. It really was a dream gig for an aspiring assistant engineer. One of my gigs there was making transfers from the big tape machines into a hard disk system like Pro Tools for editing. We didn't actually own any of the big tape machines, so we'd borrow machines from the studio downstairs. Maybe borrow is a bit strong of a term, but it's better than saying stealing! In either case, you can imagine that it wouldn't also work out where a $200,000+ tape machine was just sitting with nothing to do in a multi-million dollar studio complex during normal hours. Instead, we'd wait until a session had broken for the evening and take the tape machine out of that room and make our transfer. In order to get a machine from downstairs up to our studio required an elevator. Well, elevator might be a little strong, but rickety death trap doesn't sound good either. It did the job I guess, though that's the point in life when I can remember having a "back ache" as opposed to having a "hurt back."

You see, getting a tape machine weighing a few hundred pounds up onto the lip of the lift generally required 2 people. One person would just dead-lift one side of the machine while another person would push from the back to roll the machine up over the threshold. Easy enough operation with 2 people. In fact, not an impossible feat for one person with the right technique. One night, I didn't have the right technique apparently. It was well past 1am and I'd been working since around 8am. When I went down to nab a machine, everybody had already gone home so I was the only person in the building. When I tried to lift and pull the machine up onto the threshold, something I can only describe as a burning tear occurred in my lower back. I almost immediate fell down with no feeling in my legs. I dragged myself out of the elevator closet and contemplated calling 9-1-1. I didn't though. A couple of things occurred to me, both of which should have not swayed my decision to seek medical help, but this was just the latest in a lifetime of putting other things in front of my own health.

One thing that made me choose to not call 9-1-1; was this even an emergency? I could still breath and I could move my arms and stuff. Maybe this isn't such an emergency? There are probably people in the streets who have been run over by cars! Why should I consider the fact that all of the feeling from about my waist down had disappeared into the pain in my back an emergency? Another thought was how they would even get in? The front door was locked and deadbolted and I was probably 100 feet or so from there and it'd taken everything I could muster to get out of that lift closet. Now I was laying about 10 feet from where I'd first collapsed with the phone within a few feet. An image of a paramedic or fireman knocking the front door down left me with an even worse feeling that this isn't much of an emergency.

I stayed there for what seemed like forever, but judging by when the last activity had taken place on my computer upstairs and when I finally got back up there it was about 2 hours. Eventually the feeling in my hips and upper legs started to come back. Then I got back to where I could move my legs well enough to at least aid in the scooting motion I was using to get around. I tried to stand up a few times, but though my legs seemed to be functioning correctly, the pain in my lower back was just plain terrible. I could stand up just straight enough to prop myself up with my hands on my knees. I was starting to see that I'd probably just "snapped" something out of place in my back and that had given me the temporary paralysis and now I was feeling better. See? Not an emergency after all. My impulsive inner-self was right the whole time!

As I began to feel better about everything and was considering laying down for a little while to see if this would get better, it occurred to me that I still had about 3+ hours of transferring to get done and the machine needed to be back in place as if it had never moved. So I had to get busy! I was able to rig up a little pry-bar with some loose pieces of lumber back in the closet. That allowed me to sit down on one end of the board and use my weight to lift the front wheels up over the threshold on the tape machine. Then I put my feet on either side of the door facing and sort of "locked" my upper torso gripping the handles of the tape machine. I just pressed out with my legs and voila! The tape machine rolled up onto the lift. A few minutes later I had the machine moved off the lift and got the transfer started. I was actually starting to feel pretty good at this point and the pain had been reduced to a sharp pain when I moved. Thank you Advil!

Well, after that happened, I found myself constantly twisting or turning the wrong way and tweaking it out again. That initial injury was likely just a disc bulge that had been created in my lumbar spine region. That set Degenerative Disc Disease into motion and every little mistake I made with my physical posture or motion was rewarded with days of medicine and misery. I wasn't alone though. The other engineer at the studio hurt his back pretty bad not long after that because he was doing his best to take up the slack created by my injury. Now both of the primary assistants at the place were walking sideways and grimacing at every motion.

This is the point in the story when most people as: "Did you go to the doctor or anything?" Unfortunately for me, I didn't have any sort of health insurance at this point. I was out of school and my parents couldn't keep me on their's and the studio didn't offer any sort of benefits like that. It never really occurred to me to just go to an emergency room or something else because I knew I couldn't pay for it. Besides, my friend had been to the doctor and they prescribed him some anti-inflammatories and told him to rest.

Another doctor had told my dad the same thing. So I did a little self-medicating with about 1800mg of Advil a day when it was hurting. Worked well for years. Another side to this story is that of the studio owner. I can't blame anybody for getting hurt except myself. I simply had a job to do and I chose to get it done even though it wasn't wise for me to do it physically. They never told me to get that tape machine moved even if it meant being crippled. They DID, however, tell me a number of times how many people there were standing right outside the door just itching to have the job I had. It's a competitive field and as I said before, this was a dream gig! If I hadn't made that transfer because I couldn't move the tape machine, they would have found someone who would. True or not, that's what I thought. A reasonably intelligent person would probably ask why I'd let myself get hurt when I could've just rigged up that little lever to get the front end off the ground to begin with? Good question...good question.

Life since that initial injury was fairly normal. I always did whatever I wanted without much concern for my back...at least not until it started hurting! I moved apartments with my roommate 2 or 3 times, then bought a house and moved with my wife 3 more times. I've always tried to do as much of my own vehicle maintenance as possible, so I've rotated the tires, changed the oil, things like that forever. Never had much of a problem other than the nagging pain that would usually go away with some Advil and a little rest. I even took on the gig with ProMedia with all the travel and gear cartage it required. I went from one side of North America to the other with the aches and pains. No big deal really, didn't seem like it anyway. In the early part of 2006, we decided to move to be closer to some friends and our church. Leading up to that point, I'd started to notice that whenever I worked on something with my arms or hands, the right side of my back would just burn like an overworked muscle. It was really odd because I couldn't even stretch it out to relieve the pain.

Getting our house prepared for sale and moving to the new house really hammered it home that something was seriously wrong in my back. I noticed shortly thereafter that my spine had a little crook to it that threw my centerline out of whack. Essentially, when I stood straight up (as straight as I could), my nose, bellybutton, and other anatomical features didn't make a straight line. My hips and shoulders were also out of line and that seemed to be what was causing the pain in the muscles; they were compensating for my alignment by constantly pulling against my shoulders. Even when I TRIED to relax them, I couldn't. Only laying down would ease the tension. Darn you, Advil!! Why can't you fix all things?? Muscle relaxers had an interesting effect on the whole thing. They would make the overall muscular pain ease up some, but I think the lack of support from those muscles caused the nerve to get pinched in my back which created pain in my right hip. So now I'm crooked AND limping around. All this and I'd just turned 30 years old not long before. I thought I was going to have to see a doctor about a hip replacement or something! I decided to ditch the muscle relaxers (skelaxin in this case) and just use Advil to help with the pain. In June of '06 we took a family trip to an amusement park.

Amusement was not to be had on that trip for me. While my wife and son along with some of our friends were trying to get from one side of this busy water park to the other so the kids could enjoy themselves, I was super-crabby and hobbling around like I'd just been run over by a dump-truck and left for dead. My wife didn't really know the extent of what was going on at that point. I'd had an x-ray before with a diagnosis of "degenerative disc disease" and "Stenosis" which apparently means one of the discs was deteriorating and pressing on the nerve. The treatment at the time was...wait for it....are you ready???? Here it comes...ANTI-INFLAMMATORIES, MUSCLE RELAXERS, AND REST! Oh well, I guess that's not out of the ordinary, but my wife hadn't yet started understanding that my back pain wasn't really getting better. It was getting worse. It became even more apparent when my hip pain was so severe that it took some real effort just to get out of bed and get in the shower. By the end of the day I was generally just dragging my right leg along with me. I went for an MRI in October and it verified that I had a disc herniation at the L4/5 level that was pressing on the sciatic nerve. On the one hand, I was glad to hear that all the hip pain was resulting from the disc herniation and not from some freaky early degenerative hip joint disease.

On the other hand, it meant I'd need a lot more than just some medication and rest to get it to clear up. Considering that I didn't even have time to rest my back per all the other recommendations, how was I going to find time to undergo some other treatment. So I just let it continue to hurt while I traveled and taught and tried to make a living. At Christmas ('06), we were headed down to my parents' house down in Mississippi. We were driving my Yukon because my wife's car didn't have room for the gifts we were taking down there. Well, the Yukon (which has been from one end of North America to the other with me) threw a wheel bearing in the front, right side. We ended up sitting for 3 hours in the parking lot of an Advance Auto Parts while I completely disassembled that side of the front end. My back was killing me, but it didn't really matter. My wife, son, and dog were sitting in the truck in the middle of Alabama. We were too far from home to call friends to come help and too far from 'home' for my family to come help. God was good though and he sent us a guy who could help us out and get us back on the road. But the damage to my back had been done. It didn't stop hurting terribly until the surgery. In January of this year ('07) I had a pretty thick travel schedule.

The first week of the month we had to go to San Francisco for a Digidesign thing. I love San Francisco and I've always enjoyed going out there. On this trip, I was miserable. My back and right leg were hurting so bad that I was literally dragging that foot around with me as I limped along. So being on my feet for any period of time was painful, sitting for any period was painful, and walking was torture. Couple that with the fact that it was a bit of a hike from the awesome hotel where we were put up at to the BART station to catch a train down to Digi's HQ, then another little hike up the street to the offices and you've got a recipe for terror if you're having problems getting around. It was so bad that I had random strangers watching me walk along with my computer bag who would stop and ask if they could help me! How pathetic was I that a complete stranger would choose to come ask if I needed help? Then again, SF is suppose to be one of the "kindest" cities on the planet, so I guess I could put a check mark for them on that count.

When I returned from San Francisco my wife had made an appointment for me to see a "spinal decompression" therapist, a physical therapist, and a neurologist. So with MRI films in hand I hit the physical therapist. She told me she was sure she could fix me and prescribed some exercises and various treatments in the office. I had less than a week before I headed out for Los Angeles for Winter NAMM, so I saw her every chance I could during that period. She said the decompression therapy probably wasn't a good idea because it's a discipline of chiropractic medicine and chiropractors aren't held in very high regard with the "real" medical people. So I decided to forego that and just concentrate on the physical therapy. I DID see the neurologist right before I left because it was the earliest he could see me. He asked a funny question when I told him about the pain and when it started and the SF trip and all that. He said, "why didn't you go to a hospital or take a cab if walking was so terrible out there?"

Good question...good question. Well, physical therapy didn't accomplish much but I know I didn't give it enough time. Time was something I just didn't have. The neurologist had made the recommendation for surgery but he DID tell me to do anything non-surgical until I was satisfied that I'd tried everything. Surgeons can sometimes have that "have scalpel-must cut" attitude, but he was pretty cool with it. He told me to keep up with the physical therapy exercises while I went out of town and try to get as much rest as I could, then we'd evaluate it when I came home in February. So off I headed for LA. We were covering the NAMM show for The Musician Network and I was the guy who was doing the on-camera stuff. I had to walk around the show floor and grab anybody that seemed interesting for an interview. Given that it would take me several minutes to get from my bed to the bathroom to shower, it was obviously not much fun traversing the 3 show floors of NAMM. On top of that, there's not really much opportunity to just sit at these events, so I had to beg some favors from buddies who were there showing things and had booths. My buddy Mark Hornsby was kind enough to let me pull up a chair at his booth, Sonic Reality, while I rested. Brett from Digidesign also hooked me up with a chair at their booth too. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when we got to the Peavey booth. They had a large room segmented off in their booth for press events.

It was air-conditioned and had chairs! It wasn't open to the general public, only people with press badges. Fortunately for me, I had a press badge so they just let me right in. Thank you Mr. Peavey! Your booth saved my life during the NAMM show! On a side note, Mark Hornsby also had the privilege of making the flight back from San Francisco to Nashville with me. That pretty much meant he had to deal with my limping butt all the way across the bay on the BART to catch our flight out of Oakland. Then he had to stand in the security lines and all with me. Well, he didn't HAVE to do anything, but he DID stay with me to make sure I made it from point A to point B. He even decided we should pre-board our flight, so I became his "friend with a hurt back" and he had to carry my bags for me. I didn't know it was that easy to pre-board a Southwest flight! In any case, I've said before, but I'll say it again...Thanks, Mark. Misery loves company and you made for some great miserable company!! You rock! Now back to the program!

So after NAMM, I went had to go finish the Dallas 1/07 class I discussed in a previous blog entry. When I returned from that class I decided to give the decompression therapy a try. I saw the neurologist before I started it and he said it was worth a try, especially if it would save me from surgery. So I started going every day to this office where they would literally put me in this rig where two harnesses met over my lower back. One harness was attached to the top of the table, the other was attached to a winch and pulley system that would pull some weight off that disc. The intent is to create a suction between the vertebrae that would pull the disc and other tissue back to where they belonged, while also relieving the pressure on the nerve. After undergoing 13 of the prescribed 25 treatments while teaching my Nashville 2/04 class, I had no relief. It was becoming very obvious that surgery was the only option that offered any relief within a reasonable amount of time. So we made the decision and scheduled the surgery. The 10 days or so before the surgery were probably the most painful I've ever been through.

Standing up had become a process of first standing, then waiting for a few seconds while that initial pain wore-off, then take a step and wait for the second wave of pain to run down my right leg and back. It made for some pretty interesting looks from students and other people out in public. It seriously looked like I had stood up and been shot with a high-power rifle, then limped off into the distance. I can't even imagine what it was like to see me in public. I really knew something needed to be done when people's statements started becoming "wow, it hurts ME to see YOU trying to walk!" My back pain was now making other people hurt! I'd better get something done about that! Here's some animation provided by spine-health.com on the type of injury I had and the surgical approach So I had the surgery on the 7th. When I was waking up in the recovery room, my neurosurgeon was standing there and he said 2 things that made me know I’d made the best choice I could. First he said, “you did great,” then he said “it was quite a bit worse than thought it would be.” As it turns out, somewhere between having the surgery and the MRI I had additional trauma to that disc. I don’t know if it was snatching on that wheel in Alabama or hiking around San Francisco or NAMM, but something had caused an entirely new area of that same disc to herniate. I’m not a doctor and I don’t even play one on TV, but it seemed apparent that nothing was going to get that much trauma to heal without some intervention. Within an hour of coming out of recovery I was able to get out of the hospital bed and stand up straight. The only real problem was that my right leg and hip was aching like crazy.

I was a little worried because I’d heard so many stories of back surgeries that didn’t work and only led to more back surgeries. I hoped that pain in my leg wasn’t an indication of what I’d be left with. The only good thing was that it wasn’t shooting down my leg and it wasn’t as “sharp”. It did eventually start to go away and after a few hours of laying in my hospital bed, I was ready to go home! They obviously wouldn’t let me go just yet, but I felt like I was ready. I asked my wife to go get us some wings from Wing Stop, but she said I was on a clear liquid diet. That’s cool too. Ice chips and popsicles rock! They did let me go home on the 8th and I was glad for it. One of the most painful things for me to do was to sit straight up without being able to move at all. That made the wheelchair ride to the car a bit painful, but it’s all good. Once I got home, I noticed my right leg was a little numb. I hadn’t noticed that in the hospital because of the stockings and air booties they had on my lower legs to help prevent blood clots. Without those, I realized some of the sensation was gone.

That made it a little difficult to walk, but that’s o.k. It’s been a week now and that has passed quite a bit. I still have some numbness in my lower leg and my big toe, but otherwise I’m feeling pretty good. Spending plenty of time lying down nowadays. I’m really hoping to get back on my feet and be productive within the next week or so, but my recovery time is actually set by the doctor at 3 weeks. I guess I’ll be spending even more time staring at the ceiling and this computer! So what's the moral of this lengthy bloviation? I guess that would be to take care of your health first. I was a young engineer and I heard the footsteps behind me. I knew it was going to be tough to make it and I didn't really think I had the chops or the mentality to succeed, but I have always been willing to work my tail off if that's what it takes. Along the way I sacrificed my health. I don't know if I would do it the same again because it was successful, but I do wish I'd taken better care of myself. Everytime my son comes toward me with his arms up so I can pick him up and hold him, I have to tell him I can't.

I try to find somewhere to sit so he can still sit in my lap, but it's just not the same. I don't think it was quite THAT important that I made that transfer for an artist who's name I can't even remember. When my wife needs help getting the groceries in the house, I can't help but remember all the sessions where I was left in my chair to get some edits made while the singer and producer walked around talking on their cell phones. I curse my bad posture! Spending literally 3-6 hours at a time in a chair slumped over a keyboard or mixing console didn't help much with my back problem. If I had it to do over again, I'd tell myself to get a portable seat cushion I could carry with me. I'd also tell myself to take more short breaks to walk around. The producer and artist (and anybody else in the room) had the chance to stretch a little when they got up but if the work needed to get done, I had to stay. Even a 5 minute break could've made a difference after all the years. Posture was not something I was taught as a kid either. My parents never once told me to "stop slouching at the table." I don't blame my parents for this obviously, but it wasn't until I started having problems with my back that I started to notice the posture of others. Your ear, shoulder, hip, and ankle should form a straight line when you're standing. Mine would form more like a lower case 'L' as written by a 5 year old. How's yours?

I'm very thankful that my wife eventually saw how bad my back problem was. It really took me TELLING her how bad it was before she was gung-ho for me to get something done about it. That's a problem I share with every other person with a Y-chromosome. We get hurt sometimes and we DO have to play hurt! But you've got to know the difference in being hurt and injured. Sometimes taking a spot on the bench for a few plays is the difference between playing or not next time. If you've stuck with this rambling for this long, here's my big advice. Ready? Are you sure? O.k., here goes... If it hurts right now, but you can function, suck it up and get to work. Take some Advil or Tylenol (remember that part about me not being a doctor?) and see if it's gone the next day. If it doesn't go away but is at least a little better, stick with it and see if you'll get over it. If it stays the same for a day or so or gets worse, GO SEE A DOCTOR! If the doctor's advice doesn't help the situation, CALL THEM BACK! If they can't help you find relief from it, GO SEE ANOTHER DOCTOR!

If nothing else, a physician should be able to help you know the symptoms of an escalation of the injury. For instance, one problem some people had with my type of injury was bladder function! Glad that never happened...in class...when I wasn't standing behind something...and wasn't wearing one of my son's pull-ups. Ummm, yeah. But seriously, who would think that a sharp hip pain or a pain in their ankle was due to a pinched nerve at the bottom of their back? My neurosurgeon sure did. Don't let it take you all the way down. It's really hard to get up from this. My surgery was extraordinarily easy for what it is and compared to other surgeries people undergo daily, but even this has put me out of commission for a little while. At 31 years old with a slightly more solid professional foundation than I had at 20 years old, I can handle it now. Had I taken the time to treat this properly when it was prescribed before, I might not have had this problem ever rear its ugly head. Hopefully I'll be back to my old self very soon. I'll be back to annoying singers, harassing musicians, and generally offending most people who have anything in their lives they take seriously. I know the bosses at ProMedia CAN'T WAIT!!