I have Decompression Back Surgery set for the 7th. I am kind of starting to freak out a little bit. A little history on me before I ask the final question. I started having horrible back and leg pain after I had my daughter 5 1/2 years ago. My doctor told me then that it was Sciatica and that it will usually go away now that the baby isn’t there pushing on my nerves. As the year went by and we became pregnant with our son. I noticed the pain was getting way worse then before. Still I was told it was sciatica. After 3 years of being told it was sciatica my husband finally convinced me to meet with a spine specialist. I did so for the first time in August of 2009. At the time we didn’t know what we were dealing with so he ordered a bunch of x-rays and mri’s. All they showed were degenerative disk in my L2 and L3 as well as a cyst on my facet joints. We treated the facet joints with injections and finally after realizing it wasn’t working he decided to burn the nerves around the joints. I was pain free for a couple of weeks and was so happy with the results. Then out of no where the pain started back only it was worse and this time my back was killing me as well. I had another MRI that showed a Nerve Sheath Tumor in my L5 S1 area. He ordered a 2nd MRI with contrast to make sure we weren’t dealing with any sort of cancer. Thankfully it came back clean. It was just a sheath tumor that had grown into my nerve root. The only course of treatment at the time was injections “He didn’t want to jump into surgery right away” The first nerve block worked like a charm. I was pain free for a month!! Then the pain started coming back the 2nd and 3rd injection gave me no relief at all in fact I think I am in more pain now then before. I met back with the doctor last Thursday to figure out what our next move was going to be. His suggestion was decompression surgery in the L5 S1 area. I am ok with having to have surgery if it is going to help, but the way he was talking it wasn’t that big of a surgery and I would be back up and around the next day. In fact I would go home the same day. However everything I am finding on line says opposite of what he told me. What is decompression surgery? How major/minor of a surgery is it? And what is the recovery time? Also what could be causing cyst/tumors in my back area?
The way he described the surgery was like this. He showed me the skeleton that all doctors have just about and pointed to the bones in the lumbar area that the nerves run through and said that the tumor is on the nerve which is keeping it from passing through the whole in the bone. So he is going to go in through a 1-2 in incision and make the whole in the bone bigger by shaving off the bone until the tumor can pass through easily. He used a pencil and a toothbrush as an example or more a visual I guess. The pencil is small then a tooth brush so therefor a toothbrush would not be able to fit in the same hole a a pencil. So his goal is to make the hole big enough for the toothbrush and pencil to both fit through without bumping or rubbing the walls “bones”
