Thursday, January 15, 2009

Nerve ablation

As I've written before, B was diagnosed last year with arthritis in his neck, a result of his diving career. Turns out that hitting the water head first from 10 meters up does bad things to your neck - who would have thought it.

Last winter he had several rounds of facets injections to deaden the pain in his neck, allowing him to function. The pain relief lasted for about 10 months, but about a month ago the pain returned with a vengeance. He had another series of injections last week, but they didn't work.

So today he's having nerve ablation in the hopes that this will stop the pain. The next step is for a neurosurgeon to go in and shave down some of the bone in his vertebrae to relieve the pressure on the nerves. After that, I don't even want to think about.

Please keep your fingers crossed that this works. He's too young to be having these kinds of problems.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

oh jeez that sounds awful!

anymommy said...

I'm wincing just thinking about it. Hope the treatment is a huge success.

t. Cooke said...

Wow, it was from the diving? Nuts.

I look forward to him being well.

Danimal said...

Is B your husband or brother? I'm so sorry to hear that he's going through this. Did the nerve ablation work? I completely understand..I'm 29 and have had horrible back problems since I was 16. After many surgeries that still left me with pain, I decided to have a spinal cord stimulator implanted (I just started a blog about it at chronicstimulation.blogspot). Anyway, I wish him the best of luck..there are a lot of young people out there that can truly relate, me being one of them. ;)

Danimal