You guys have time to mull over the options!?

[Margo]

Usually I'm pretty meticulous about things (e.g., taking supplements I look up their contraindications, etc.), but for my 2 spinal surgeries things got so bad that I was just desperate for someone to take me out of my misery. Is it unusual for degenerative disk problems to escalate very quickly? That's how mine were.

Margo

[davemmevad]

Hi Margo,

Well, personally, yes, I have the time to mull them over ... the insurance referral process, and the MD's schedule have provided me with FAR more time to do so than I would have wanted, but I get to mull it over in the meantime

Actually, as much as I want to say FIX IT NOW the very real answer is alot of back problems go away after time, and I think they make you wait just to give that a chance. Well, okay, they really make you wait in hopes that it will go away and they won't have to pay, but the end result is the same, and for me that makes time to mull it over. Of course I'm likely just making excuses for a very poorly organized system, but here I am.

As to the speed of deterioration, it depends on what you mean by fast & slow. If fast is a matter of weeks or days, then it was fast, but when I look back, the symptoms were there long before in much more subtles forms, so I just ignored them. But from the time they were noticable to unbearable, it was relatively quick.

Cheers
Dave

[KBear]

Trauma, such as in my case, can cause fast degeneration as well (more like the initial disc injury, then it goes downhill from there). However, the natural disease progression isn't what I'd call 'fast'. I think a lot of times people ignore the symptoms when they are manageable and then all the sudden are hit by constant pain and think it happened overnight, when it has actually been coming to that for years.

[Margo]

In my 2 stenoses (thoracic & cervical) there were some earlier symptoms for each, but there were other things going on. Evidently these stenoses - in both cases - triggered autoimmune reactions. (I just got a test result back confirming the cervical-related reaction).

So in both cases there were some early symptoms that were mostly not bad and didn't raise any flags. For the cervical though, about 6 months before that surgery I began feeling changes in my digestive system, so I underwent a bunch of testing for that.

But before the spinal symptoms became more bothersome, in both cases I had a crisis of a new autoimmune condition. The thoracic stenosis triggered fibromyalgia and the cervical stenosis triggered a horrendous neck rash that literally developed overnight and a swollen face that resulted in me getting 3 benadryl injections the first week and now I'm on 3 antihistimines.

By the time those autoimmune crises were dealt with then the spinal symptoms went into overdrive, so there wasn't a lot of time to really mull things over. As it is, it's possible I didn't have the cervical surgery quite soon enough because it's uncertain whether the nerves causing facial symptoms will heal properly - whether there was permanent nerve damage from the stenosis.

I guess if I hadn't had the autoimmune crises right before the stenoses symptoms started to become unbearable there might have been some time to mull things over.

Fortunately, in both cases, I had neurosurgeons that I trusted and I think they both did a good job, despite my not being able to shop around.

I just found out about the cervical autoimmune test results, which came back positive, so now I wonder where we'll go with that...

Margo