Well, The Nerve.....

Yesterday was a good day.  We had a consultation with a different doctor who is a specialist in spinal surgery.  Dave thinks I'm jumping the gun because we're not done consulting on this, but this guy is the best in his field and according to this fine dude there is no damage to my back hardware or to my back in general.   However, according to surgeon #1 I don't need spinal surgery.  We'll see another neurosurgeon (Surgeon #2) on Tuesday so we'll see what he has to say. We're getting answers but at the same time it's getting a bit more complicated.  It seems that the experts in the areas I need help in are not on our insurance (i.e. Surgeon #1, above and Surgeon #3, below)  There is, however precedence where insurance companies have "jumped the fence" if they cannot provide the level of care that the patient needs within their plan.  So, while I'm happy, I'm still a bit confused because if we estalish that I do NOT need spine surgery, we still have the hip that is not healing.  There is a non-union of the bones so it's quite important that I get someone who's very good at dealing with this kind of problem.  There's an expert "Hip Man"(Surgeon #3) in town but "Guess What?"  He's not on our insurance plan!  Continued prayers would be truly welcome as we may be needing to deal with our HMO and they've been known to eat people, spit them out and then eat them again--eewww!.  One the other hand (I'm running out of hands) our HMO has never given us any problems and has always come through when we needed them so we're starting out on a positive note.

The diagram above is the hip--not mine but some healthy person.  My fracture pretty much yanked the bone apart almost pulling the "ball" out of the "socket". It is either a sub-trochanteric or inter-trochanteric fracture; my doctors have differing opinions about that.  Anyway, it's the top part of the femur.  Without going into gory details, there was a lot of soft tissue damage and bleeding under the skin and one part of the bone ended up somewhere in my abdomen--I really wasn't paying too much attention.  As a result of all the trauma and other damage, it is having trouble healing.  It's referred to as a "non-union" which is just what it sounds like,  While everything is in alignment, there appears to be a bit of "gaposis" (not a medical term).  What might have to happen is that they need to surgically remove that area and put in a new hip joint.   I can try to see if they'll put in a small one so I can go down a size or two in my jeans, but I'm scared to ask because I don't think it works that way--tee hee.

The diagram on the right is the spinal cord with all it's tiny little nerves coming out.  Seven years ago I had fusion of my L5-S1 vertebrae and then there was damage to the nerve that's supposed to go through that area so I had to have another surgery to fix that and then another one to try to fix the damage caused by that resulting in 3 back surgeries in 6 weeks.  "In for a penny, in for a pound"--I don't know what that means but I think it fits here. That left me a gimp who walks with a cane and a chronic painer because the surgery didnt really help the back pain that was what I went in for anyway.  If you can understand all that you either are in the medical field, should be in the medical field or you are as loopy as I am and we should get together for coffee sometime!  Can you see why I'm not too keen to be having back surgery any time soon????????????


 So I will now leave you with a bit of miscellanea that I picked up on my computer search for this post that shows just how closely related to the animal kingdom we are:

Trochanter, femur, tibia and tarsus of an earth-boring dung beetle

4th Trochanter, a shared characteristic common to archosaurs.