Surgery

A little background: At the end of January Brent hurt his back while at work. He was lifting some boxes of salt and tweaked it somehow. He was on nights, so when he woke up the next day he couldn't move. He went to the chiropractor who eventually, after not being able to help anymore, referred him to an orthopedic Dr. in Jackson. Dr. Neal told him that he had ruptured his disc. Let me give you a quick lesson on spinal discs (because we didn't know much about them). Your disc is like a grape, it has a skin with pulpy stuff inside. The skin ripped and the pulpy stuff was oozing out putting pressure on his sciatic nerve, causing all the pain. The nerve was getting inflamed and also casing pain. She immediately put a halt to most activities that he was previously doing; mainly lifting, pulling, and pushing motions. She tried a series of steroid shots to see if the inflammation would go down. Nothing was working 100% like, so she determined that surgery would be the only way to fix it. So, surgery it was. Luckily for us Workers Comp is going to cover everything. After all the horror stories we heard about them we were nervous, but they have been great to work with. Thank goodness.

Now, on to the surgery part...surgery was scheduled for Monday morning so we went to Jackson Sunday afternoon. We left the boys with our parents and headed out. We had booked a pretty cheap motel because we figured we weren't going to spend much time there anyway...Well, we didn't bargain for how cheap it was. Here are some pictures so you get the idea. In case it doesn't look that small, it was about 10 steps by 10 steps. Yes, pure luxury! Shady enough that I didn't stay there by myself the next night! I stayed here instead.

Sunday evening we went and looked at the elk while Brent could still enjoy it. This is the view from the art gallery on the hill (you know what I'm talking about, Mom and Dad).

We got to the hospital at about 7:30 and they finally took him back at about 9:45 to start surgery. Two hours of prep stuff. After 2 hours the nurse called me from the operating room to tell me everything was going great. That was kind of weird, but whatever. The operation was done 45 minutes later and everything went great. Here is a picture that they gave him of the operation in progress. It won't turn, not sure why, and I'm not exactly sure what it is. I think it is her grabbing the part of the disc that is causing the pressure and removing it...but I could be totally wrong. He stayed overnight until they knew he wouldn't be sick, his pain was under control, and he could walk. We made the 3 hour trek home and here we are, two days later. He is feeling much better with no pain in his leg and behind like he had before. The only pain he has is from the incision and it is getting better everyday.