Before my op I thought I would look like the glamorous magician’s assistant who had an accident during the ‘lets saw the lady in half trick’ but that turned out not to be the case. My incision looks more like an accident on the helter skelter as it spirals around me from almost my navel, up past my ribcage and around up towards my shoulder blade. In these days of keyhole surgery, the surgeon must have rolled up his sleeves and said ‘let’s have some fun boys…’
Anyway, having wedged me on my side and made his incision, it was time to get all my nasty obstructive innards out the way of my spine. Given the problems with my intestines after the op, I guess they just pushed them all to one side of me and then found when they tried to put them back that they wouldn’t quite fit in the same way! The next trick was to remove my bottom rib and pass it to the guy in the corner to grind it up to use for bone graft material. I personally have a mental image of him putting it in a plastic bag and hitting it with a rolling pin in the way that you would bash up digestive biscuits for a cheesecake base but I don’t suppose it’s really like that (hee hee!). Once the rib was out of the way they cut through the diaphragm and then do something like stick a pin in your lung so it collapses (it’s still attached to you so doesn’t fly off round the room like a popped balloon thank goodness). So all the preparation work done to give them access they get going on your spine.
The first thing they do is take out your discs – I don’t know how, but it probably involves a hammer and chisel. Once they’ve done that you have a wibbly wobbly spine which is much more flexible – from here it’s onto big boy’s toys, a nice big drill and a really expensive meccano set! They first twist each vertebra to get rid of your rotation and then drill into the bony bit of each vertebra and insert a screw with a hole in the end. Then a rod is treaded through the screws and these are then tightened up which pulls the spine into alignment with the rod. Then comes your rib which is squeezed into where your discs used to be (this may or may not involve a piping bag). This will (in time) grow, attaching each vertebra to the one next to it making a solid column. For the technical among you, this covered the area T10 to L5. Slight hiccup when L4/L5 didn’t quite hold up so a cage was inserted (see http://www.spineuniverse.com/displayarticle.php/article1523.html for more info on cages)– this involved more drilling and screwing – men eh – can’t get enough of all this DIY!
Well, it was time to put me back together – insert chest drain (push tube in until it hits solid surface (eek!)) – find extra bit of stuff – “what’s this, shall we put it in or leave it out?” and then it was time to turn me over onto my front and get ready to slice me open from the back to sort out T3 to T10 but….something happened and after 6.5 hours already on the table they decided to go home for tea. The good news was that I got a much much better correction than expected from what they had actually done so I have to wait until my 6 weeks check-up before they decide whether or not to do the rest. Kind of odd if they do, but there will be no nasty lung stuff involved with a second op if I need it so it’ll be a bit easier…
So, that’s it…the technical stuff is this: USS II instrumentation (http://www.synthes.com/html/USS_II.4688.0.html) used T10 to L5. This stabilises my spine around broken vertebrae at T12, original spina bifida lesion at T12/L1 and split spinal cord T11 to L3. Cage used at L4/L5 to correct saggital imbalance caused by de-rotation of spine during operation.
1 comment:
Crikey, you could have shortened that into "It's like making kebabs"... To paraphrase SFJ a little - "you really are truly amazing".
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