Microdiscectomy

After being stuck on the couch for over 2 months, Zach finally had surgery to remove the bulging portion of his herniated disc.

Elizabeth took advantage of her dad being stuck on the couch.

Zach had surgery on his disc Wednesday, April 6th. It was a happy birthday present to himself, or rather it should have been, had everything gone as planned.

Zach and Elizabeth a few days before the surgery.

Here's what I understand about the issue/cause of the pain: (you can go to the WebMD link to read a better medical description of the issue and procedure) http://www.webmd.com/back-pain/discectomy-or-microdiscectomy-for-a-herniated-disc.

One of Zach's lower discs was bulging out and pressing on the nerve root or spinal cord that runs down to his left leg, sending shooting pain down to his foot and also causing muscle loss in his left leg and numbness in his foot/toes.

So, for the surgery, they put him under and then used a special microscope to view the bulging disc and nerves. The doctor is able to remove the bulge through a smaller incision by using this microscope, thus causing less damage to the surrounding tissue.

We checked into the hospital at 6:30 am for all the prep stuff and they took him back for surgery at 8:00. 

At about 10:00 am I talked with the surgeon and he said everything went well. There was a tiny hitch, in that Zach's nerve's had quite a bit of scar tissue around it (indicating that the problem has been building for quite a while). Although this isn't totally normal, the doctor said it just meant he had to remove some of the scar tissue in order to be able to move the nerve aside and get to the bulging disc. He also said that he didn't see any reason Zach couldn't go home by 5:00 pm the same day! YAY! That's what we'd hoped for.

At 11:00 am I was told Zach was being moved out of recovery into a regular room. But when I got to the room he was supposed to be brought into, there were other people there...come to find out they were discharging a patient from the room and then needed to clean it before they could put Zach in there. SO...3 hours later (and being moved to 3 different rooms thinking I'd get to see Zach soon) I finally got to see him after his surgery. 

Other than being a little pale and having quite a bit of swelling on one side of his mouth/lips from the tube down his throat and then being on his face for the surgery, Zach was looking pretty good. However, we did find out that Zach had a terrible reaction to the antibiotics they'd given him right before surgery. Luckily giving him Benadryl got that under control.

We hung out at the hospital until the surgeon stopped in around 7:00 and told us we could go. He was a little sad to leave the fancy leg warmers that gave a little bit of a massage every minute or so, but most we were happy to not be in the hospital anymore.

Wednesday night went OK, but Thursday he got a pounding headache whenever he stood up which would also made his nauseous. He had that through the weekend and it started to get less by Tuesday evening. When we talked to the doctors about it on Monday morning, they thought it may be a spinal leak (as we suspected). They told him to stay completely flat for 3 days if it wasn't gone by Thursday morning, they'd take him back in for a procedure to help clot the leak. 

Luckily, he's feeling tons better, no headache and the nausea is mostly gone. We're excited that he's on a happier road to recovery now!