The Skinny on My Spine

Here are the details as I understand them.

The spinal column is split into regions. There is the top which is the Cervical Region and supplies functions to the neck and arms. The middle is the Thoraic Region that helps with the chest and abdomen and helps with breathing and coughing. And the lower area is the Lumbar Region (think lower back) that helps out the legs and such. At the very bottom is the Sacral which helps with the bowels, bladder, and sexual functions.

For me, I shattered L4. Pulverized the poor thing into shards, the problem with the shards is that they get stuck in things, namely they got stuck in my spinal cord. Now, the spinal cord is fragile, tear anything and you have lost feeling in whatever that nerve is connected to. So what did I do, I sent a group of sharp bone shards directly into my spinal cord, buried them there with razor edges and then asked the doctors to play the most sensitive game of 'Operation' you could ever imagine. The stakes were a bit higher than I would have liked.

To that the L3 and L5 vertebrae were also broken, but they were breaks that were cleaner and were able to be reset with hardware. Kind of like each was cracked in half, reset, and screwed back together.

As for the shards, the operation became a challenge of picking small pieces of my vertebrae out of my spinal cord, pull too hard, tug the wrong way, and there goes feeling somewhere. Almost hard to write this. But for 9+ hours they labored away, slowly cleaning up the damage I had done. Once the cleaning was done they redid the vertebrae, and I am a little foggy on all this but with a truckload of hardware, screws, rods, and more they stabilized my spine.

In the end they were exceedingly happy about the results. So much so that there was an expected second operation on the table and they now believe it to be unneeded. What was that operation you ask? Let me tell you. They start by opening my stomach, working between the major veins just after the aorta splits, move aside my major interior organs to get to the spinal cord and column where they repair what could be considered the interior rather than the exterior of the area. Dangerous, frighteningly dangerous. But we are hoping, crossing our fingers, and praying that this will be unnecessary down the road.

In the end, the diligence and extraordinary efforts of the surgeons not only succeeded in pulling off a miraculous operation, but did it so well that the even more dangerous operation is off the table for now. How can you express your gratitude in that type of a situation? It is hard to adequately express my thanks to the team of neurosurgeons at Long Island College Hospital that have put me in such a good place for recovery. They are amazing people.