Monday, July 9, 2012

Coping with Back Problems

Who would know better than I what back problem is - as I am suffering from this agony for almost a decade now. However, due to references and research articles available on the internet, I have been able to cope with the pain to a great extent.


Since I know how much agonizing the pain could be, I am always on the lookout for references that may help others - herein under is one such reference that may be found helpful by those suffering from the back problems:

By: Marianne Conway

I was diagnosed two years ago with spondylolisthesis between the L5 spinal vertebra and the S1 bone of the sacrum. My sacrum was slipping backwards, tilting downwards, and losing its position relative to the rest of my spine. When I asked the doctor what I did to get this condition, she said it usually starts in childhood due to a sudden injury. At age 55, I found out that I suffered for maybe 45 to 50 years from a childhood injury, and I had not known anything about it. She could have knocked me over with a feather! But her diagnosis started to make a little more sense as I remembered various lower back problems over the years. 

One memory came to me recently while lying in bed before sleeping. It was a scene of me exercising, performing straight leg raises and sit-ups with classmates in a field near my elementary school’s basketball court around fourth or fifth grade, probably age 8 or 9. It was a body memory of how I needed to adjust my lower back position and do the exercises at an angle to avoid a strange clicking sound. The person holding my ankles while I did sit-ups could not hear anything, but I remember feeling the internal clicks back then. Why did it initially seem so strange for me to think that childhood injuries did not somehow resolve themselves on their own?

If I get physically injured today, I know it takes treatment and healing over time in order to get well. What happens if I choose to not get the treatment I need for childhood physical or emotional injuries? If, instead of receiving treatment for the root causes, I try to 'suck it up' or 'move on' or 'get over it' am I really physically or emotionally well at any time after the injuries? What happens when I do not get the treatment I need because I do not even realize that I am physically or emotionally injured? I just lessened the physical and emotional symptoms of spondylolisthesis with stretches and exercises. 


My doctor informed me that there was no chance of a cure, and that the next level of treatment would be to fuse the L5 vertebra and the S1 bone. I had surgery for the forgotten back injury that may have been there at age 9. To prepare for the surgery, I lay still 30 minutes for a lumbar MRI that produced some interesting images. I know that it was not a good thing to hear my doctor say my spondylolisthesis was 'impressive.' When I looked at the bottom of the picture, I saw how far S1 dislocated away from L5 just along the axis of this one view. Other MRI images showed how the S1 bone slid backwards and tilted downwards to pinch the spinal nerves in that area. 

It was no wonder that that part of my back hurt all the time. But it did not hurt as much after I better understood what was going on with it. There was no longer the added emotional pain of not knowing exactly the source of my physical pain. There was also relief from emotional pain when I took steps to address the physical problem. I no longer waited for some undefined future event to make me act. I waited long enough to take care of my spondylolisthesis, until it became rated as a grade 3 severity on a scale of 1 to 3. I elected surgery to fuse S1 and L5, replace the disk between them with a spacer, and have a titanium 'cage' placed around the area to support various rods and screws. 

The surgeon aligned that part of my spine to what it was before the forgotten childhood injury of 45-50 years ago. It took me a while to adjust to the correct configuration, since it was wrong for so long. A lot of guesswork went into treating spondylolisthesis 25 years ago. I am glad that I had the needed operation last year. I asked my surgeon what people with my condition did 50 years ago. He said that the patients eventually stopped walking. There was not a treatment for that type of back problem. Only the symptoms were treated.

Author Resource:->  Nike Free Tilbud tn pas cher The blog Getting Well for the First Time describes a gradual process of healing from physical and emotional illnesses, with articles such as Getting Weight Back to a Baseline.

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