I just got a chance to put my feet up for a few minutes this evening and chill out a little. We have family starting to gather for holiday weekend. It’s been a good week, filled with lots of special people.
Monday we straightened up a 22 yo young lady with a painful 49 degree progressive painful adolescent idiopathic thoracic scoliosis from Charleston, SC. We also helped a lady with a degenerative scoliosis from Virginia Beach, with collapse above an old L4-S1 fusion done many years ago. Both are recovering well and will go home sometime this week.
Today I did a half day clinic with a bunch of adolescent and young adult scoliosis follow-ups. Highlights included college swimmer from Virginia Tech now 6 months out from her scoliosis surgery swimming now 1.5 hours per day, and starting major weight training after Thanksgiving break. Also saw one of my dear younger adolescent young ladies from Morehead City, about 3 hours away, who had severe double curve now 8 weeks postop, and 4 inches taller after her surgery! She’s back to school now doing well, and thankful for her new posture.
We also got to see Marie back for follow-up. She’s a lady around 50 who is now 6 weeks postop from a thoracolumbar fusion for a painful progressive kyphosis secondary to a spine fracture. She is now doing very well, standing up straight with good relief. Her before and X-Rays are shown on he lef side.
After clinic today, Leslie and I helped Dan, a very athletic guy in his 50’s with a severe multilevel cervical spinal stenosis. I performed a C34, C45, C56 and C67 anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF) using innovative PEEK cage technology to correct an issue he had with previous collapsing allograft bone plugs. His wife Rachel and I had a good chat about how to tie Dan down a little bit after surgery so he gives himself a chance to heal!
My In-Laws are up visiting from Florida, and they brought a gift from one of my patients who is their next door neighbor there: home made cranberry scones! That was our dessert after lasagna tonight. Awesome. This is actually the second batch we’ve enjoyed — the last batch was this past winter when our family visited them at their home in Florida. Dear people. My in-laws have both had successful lumbar spondylolisthesis and stenosis surgery done years ago, and are both extremely active with dance, tennis, jogging, swimming, travel, gardening and the like. My In-Laws are still thankful, for their improved quality of life even more than 12 and 7 years ago since their spine surgeries.
And finallly, here’s a note I received this evening from Neal, one of our lumbo-sacral spondylolisthesis postop patients: