Dr Zeegers surgery alone.

[Karger]

Thanks Henry,

I plan on bringing my wife and finding a baby sitter for my kids for the 2 weeks. Hope all is well.

[mmglobal]

Karger... sorry I missed your question about why my recovery was worse than average. It has to do with the amount of post-op pain I had. After my wife's ADR surgery, I could never even get her to say she was in pain... "I'm uncomfortable" is all I could get out of her. She was up and about the day of her surgery and we were sightseeing just a few days later.

Most of my adult life, I was a really serious athlete. In the years before my spine surgeries, I played soccer 6 days a week and went rock-climbing and skydiving several times a month. I like to believe that I have a very high pain tolerance and still see it today as I have done nearly ALL of my dozens of facet injections, epidurals, costo-vertebral joint injections, intercostal nerve blocks and discograms without ANY sedation. I usually watch the monitor during the procedure. In first day post-op, I literally passed out from the pain twice when I tried to get up to go to the bathroom. I was more than a week post-op before I could walk the 1/2 mile to the clinic, while I watched other patients sightseeing 6 miles/day at less than a week post-op. I was scheduled to come home on day 10, but there was not way I could have (reasonably) made the trip home. I rescheduled and came home on day 15.

There are some interesting trade-off's in waiting till day 15 and I believe that most patients will think that is too long. Call me and we can discuss it... too much to type here.

When are you scheduled.

Mark

[mmglobal]

People should note that while I describe such a difficult first 2 weeks post-op, the recovery after that was stellar. A few weeks later I was riding my bike to PT, rollerblading around the neighborhood backwards with 2 yellow labs on leash. At 3 months I was playing tennis and at 4 months I was skiing black diamond runs and scuba diving.

If you are lucky, you'll have an easy time. If you are unlucky, it will be difficult. BUT... the difficult times are just a few more days or weeks of the same kind of hell we all lived with for years before our surgeries. The only think that matters is how you feel at 6 months, 2 years, 5 years....

Good luck!

Mark