We have 22 days till we fly out and it can't come soon enough.
But I am getting ahead of myself. I’m going to start by giving you some of my findings in the hope that it will help your search for an answer. It has taken me a long time to find all the necessary info and I will endeavor to pull it all together in this blog.
In my last post I talked about going to Europe for the surgery and gave the reasons why, basically they have been doing it longer (20 plus years), ergo the surgeons have more experience than here and they have the M6 Lumbar Artificial Disk which is made here in the US but has not been approved by the FDA. (go figure)
There are three top spine surgeons in the world (imho, there are others but these 3 seem to come to the top in all studies):
http://www.spirehealthcare.com/southampton/our-facilities-treatments-and-consultants/our-consultants/mr-christopher-john-dare/ Mr Christopher John Dare, Orthopedic Surgeon, who is a Consultant in Adult and Pediatric Spinal Surgery, Spire Southampton Hospital, England. He studied under the late Mr Boeree who was rated as another top surgeon in the field.
www.betterdiscreplacement.com/about/lang.asp Dr. Karsten Ritter-Lang, Orthopedic Surgeon, Head of the Spinal Surgery Department at 3 hospitals especially the Stenum Hospital – Bremen, Germany. He has apparently performed over 6,000 surgeries, of which 5,584 were spinal column reconstructions and has done over 3,000 Disc Replacement procedures using a wide range of implants both cervical and lumbar.
http://www.bcn-sc.com/ Doctor Pablo Clavel an internationally renowned neurosurgeon. The Medical Director at the Quiron Hospital in Barcelona, Spain and has 15 years’ experience in spinal surgery, a field in constant evolution whose innovation he himself has contributed to.
Ok, so I chose Dr Clavel and Barcelona. Why?
Well, I liked the idea of a neurosurgeon working on my back as I know some of the nerves have been damaged from previous surgeries, the constant herniation’s and exposure to the irritating center contents of the disks and the pieces of the disk that have broken off and irritate the nerves until the pieces are either reabsorbed or removed surgically.
Plus, all I hear in my head is Freddie Mercury and Monserrat Caballe singing ‘Barcelona’. With that in your head all the time what’s a girl to do?? http://youtu.be/Wixz_r7v51E (Mercury and Caballé singing "Barcelona" on October 8th 1988 at huge open air La Nit festival staged in Barcelona, which was held to celebrate the arrival of the Olympic Flag from Seoul.) Watch to the end it's very stirring with lots of fireworks.
The good news is that we have a date for the operation, June 5th. We leave for Barcelona on the 2nd, arrive the 3rd, pre-op the 4th and under the knife on the 5th. I am getting L3/4 and L4/5 replaced with an M6-L, I have some problems with L5/S1 but we will have to talk to the surgeon about that one during pre-op.
In my next post I have some pictures that help you correlate leg pain to the disk causing the pain. When I saw this picture it was a huge aha moment for me.