Update on WhiteBeard's surgery yesterday

Last night was really bad as was my four hours in recovery after my surgery, my surgery started at around 11:20 yesterday morning and I was taken to recovery at around 2:30 in the after noon. I was in recovery till 6:30 last evening they were waiting for a bed to open up. I thought that strange, as this surgery has been scheduled for quite some time, I would have thought that they would have had a place reserved or at least all set up for me. Anyway I was able to take my 6 AM oxycontin and Baclofen yesterday morning at home. they held my Oxycontin at 2 PM as I was still in surgery, when in recovery when I woke up they had the Morphine PCA pump on and also Norco every four hours, and valium, and injectable Decadron.  When awake enough to realize about the PCA I asked about the my normal pain meds ie 40mg Oxycontin every eight hours, and Percocet for break through. Well they told me that was not ordered, and at that time I was getting 2mg morphine every 20 minutes, but I had to press the button for it, actually they did it in recovery, it was not enough, so they finally reset it to 2mg every 15 minutes. Still not good enough so they gave me the Norco and Valium. When they finally got me up on the unit and in my finally nesting place, my nurse set it to the max dosage on the orders, 2mg morphine every 8 minutes, with the Norco every four hours, with Valium and my normal dose of Baclofen. the bad thing was to get the pain relief I had to be awake to press the button every 8 minutes to get the under dose of Morphine. And the other thing, Narco has Hydrocodone in it. and Hydrocodone keeps me awake, that was the major problem with when I took Vicodin and Vicoprofen, when I took it felt a little dopey but also wired and unable to sleep allot worse than the stongest coffee!  I did fall asleep for 30 minutes during the night and woke up from the absolutely terrible pain because of course I was not able to get the pain medicine while I was asleep. I asked them why they could not just set the PCA pump to automaticly do the injection into the IV every eight minutes and the reason given was that would undermine the purpose of the PCA  and the way the orders were written. My daughter who is a Nurse at Mayo Clinic had fits when she heard about this! Anyway since I am back on my regular meds and the extra Oxycodone I have drasticly decreased the amount of Morphine I have been using, as before I was going through the entire cartidge right on the schedule time frame!

My next problem appears to be getting home health care nurse or home PT, they are saying that I do not need a home health care nurse and PT says that I do not need them either, but they definitely want me to have in home occupational therapy services for awhile to get me up to speed on things of daily living in my home.  but there is a major problem with this, because home occupational theraoy services  is not stand alone payable service, medicare will not pay for Occupational therapy  unless there is also either a home health care nursing or home Physical Therapy along with the Occupational Therapy. So right now that is up in the air, they wanted me to go to there Occupational therapy facility but there is the problem of driving, as I will not be able to drive for a while. and it is over 30 some miles away. They did say I could self pay out of pocket for the  in home service, but I cannot afford that, I am on a fixed income SSD and VA disability and just a portion of my military retirement,( the ex gets a good portion of my military retirement as per military spousal benefits.)  Anyway, I am not sure what will happen with this, I will find out more tomorrow, when they come in, they have pointed out allot of things I had not thought about. Grocery shopping and doing laundry, and simple house chores. they tell me I will be severely limited on doing allot of things for several months. So they definitely think I need to have them come to my home so they can observe and then teach and help me figure it all out, so I can prevent any future injury or problems with this surgery.

More to come..............White Beard

Post Edited (White Beard) : 1/10/2013 2:19:40 PM (GMT-7)

I am a little unhappy today, as the other neurosurgeon ( my neurosurgeons partner, came to seem me this morning0  and literally ripped the bandages off  my back and told me to leave it open, there is no staples or regular stitches on the outside,  he said it is "glued: to gether???" and  I was given instructions on the care of the incision. The thing I am up set about, is the the bandage they used,  I am extremely allergic to most tapes and they know it, especially the hyper allerigenic paper tapes, as they really do a job on skin.  Well two inches away from the incision just about all the way around it, my skin is blistered and badly torn and flaming red and sore! In all my ohter surgeries they never used any tape on them at least not a bandage type of tape! Need I say I am not a happy camper about that!

If I am repeating some thing for give me,........ Last night my surgeon came in to see me and my lower back is not good at all, he explained, how the vertebra are like joints and how they fit together, and are suppose to work, well the L4/L5 vertebra joint is separated ( widely separated allot! way to far apart to even work,  and the body is trying to fill in the space with calicum and bone matter, he told me he got out the special high power microscope and examined the nerve roots and nerve cells thoroughly , he even took scrapings and samples, to further examine them,  he told me that the bone and the calcium deposits  is scrapping on the nerve roots and have damaged them severely)  he said he cleaned it out as best he could and also opend up the framinal openings that the nerve roots pass through at L3/4 and L4/5. He said that they we extremely impinged upon and he had to cut away allot of bone to open up the space for the nerves. Now the problem is,..... he said considering my symptoms and my ability to move and everything he did not want to do anything more at this time that might cause further damage, and give me more limitations. He did say that he thought over time it would get encreasing worse, and if and when it did I could expect to have more surgery done and at that time he would have to  insert all ot of hardware and screws correct and stabalize it. He told me he would go over it more thoroughly and in dept at my follow up apppointment on the 21st. He did tell me that this was not  visable on the  MRI and was only  apparent  after he got in there and and was able to thorough examine the entire situation. Anyway he is hoping that what he did will help with decreasing my leg and buttock pain and will give me some added time.  He did stress that the damage was severe, and the L4L5 area is very very bad. What can you do???

I still have the up most faith and trust in my neurosurgeon, however I am not all that impressed with his partner, nor his surgical nurse, but that is another story.  Anyway they have all agreed that after I was given the proper pain management  as prescribed by my PM, that I it made an extreme change in my recovery and pain levels!!  and they were really impressed at my turn around!  I guess other doctors from other clinics and hospitals are not as stupid and uninformed and backward as they might think!  In the end ( and this is strictly my oppinion) that was the whole problem!!! Rightly or Wrongly  my PM is not part of this clinic or hospital organization, but is a member of the "" other rival competition medical organization" in town. Even though they both have medical privaliges in each other facilities, they still don't seem to work that well together! Just my oppinion of course, but when ever I mentioned my PM all the nursing staff on my unit that I was staying on, seemed to act a bit awkward about me being treated by him, however  they were extremely interested and impressed when I told them about the kind of treatment I received from his facility, and they found it hard to believe that this doctor would do all those things for his patients.

One more thing, I am having problems getting any home care and I am still working on that, my town and county is kind of backward in reguards to providing this type of care. So this is still in a progress in work! I am glad to be home though!  I want to thank every one here for their kind word of support! I do appreciate it!!

 Just as a point of interest  to those that might be medically curious, I do have a six to eight inch incision from about my waist line down to the top crack on my buttocks right down the middle of my spine. As a nurse my self   "parts are part" and some of us are interested in knowing about this stuff! I personally think that is interesting, and the more people can explain about there condition and their surgeries the more facinated I am in it and the better I can understand  what my fellow CP patients are going through.

White Beard