Tweedle Beetle Tri-Atheletle

In all honesty, I am really looking forward to the surgery... well maybe a better way of saying it is that I am tired of being in pain and ideally, the surgery is going to fix the worst of the pain and hopefully cause less than I have now. This last month has been bloody awful, plagued with sleepless nights, constant fatigue, constant nerve pain, paralysis in my triceps and numbness in my fingers.  I really feel for people who are struggling with cronic pain - without relief it really wears on a person.

My surgery today was bumped up from its original time of 6:00 PM to 3:30.  I need to be at the hospital for preparations by 1:30 and hopefully I will be out by 5:30 PM.  Most likely I will be discharged from the hospital the following day but I am planning on being a "slow" recovery so that I can be pampered for another day so :).

Dr. Keenen, a very experienced neurosurgeon (30 years) and Dr. Tatsumi (a neurosurgeon and an instructor for implantation of artificial disks and has done 100s of these) will be working on me for what should be 1.5 hrs or so.

During my recovery, my beautiful and wonderful wife will be keeping my blog up to date with my recovery status. 

Check back to see how everything goes!

Well,

I am scheduled for a Cervical Disectomy and artificial disk implant on Thursday at 6:00 PM.  I had my pre-opp appointment this morning with the doctor and really feel good about the procedure.  As my current surgeon (Dr. Keenen) has only done 15 of these surgeries, he will be joined by his partner, Dr. Tatsumi (http://www.orspine.com/doctors.html) who has done over 50.  I am hoping that this will help me over the long term to prevent other disk injury which could have been caused by a total vertebrae fusion.

I don't have much time now but wanted to share the following video as a way to describe the procedure.