Cause I Gotta Have Faith…

Slip­ping Hope

I have to admit, there were some days last week, when the pain crept back, that I began to won­der if I’d ever be free from it. Dur­ing these times I feel like I’m slid­ing back down the moun­tain, pass­ing every­thing that I thought was progress.. I begin to doubt if I’ve really made it that far, or if it was just a mirage in the desert. Will I ever be able to make back into the real world? Or am I ban­ished for life to the land of the invalids?

For­tu­nately, that was last week. I’m glad to report that the recent two cor­ti­sone shots into my back to help bring the remain­ing inflam­ma­tion down after surgery for a severe disc her­ni­a­tion seem to be work­ing. While I was in more pain for a week after the shots, I have regained strength this past week and am hope­ful that the pain will con­tinue to lessen as the doc­tor expects. My goal is to get to a point where I can stop tak­ing vicodin all together in a cou­ple of weeks. I’m down to a half pill in the AM and a half in the PM right now, from 8 full pills 2 months ago, so it could happen.

If I’ve learned any­thing thing dur­ing my 7 months of pain and recov­ery it’s that every­thing takes longer than I thought it would. This seems to be espe­cially true with my sit­u­a­tion, as it was worse than the doc­tors and sur­geons orig­i­nally thought it was. Seems I had the remains of another disc her­ni­a­tion push­ing on the back­side of the nerve. With the lat­est her­ni­a­tion push­ing form the front, my nerve was sand­wiched pretty good.

Bad news, or good?

Yes­ter­day my phys­i­cal ther­a­pist actu­ally said the body takes a year after surgery to heal. With my nerve hav­ing been so com­pressed, it could take even longer she added. My heart sank when I heard this. A YEAR?!! That’s the first time I had heard such a time­frame. What gives?!

It’s as if all of my doc­tors and ther­a­pists feel that I’m not able to han­dle all of the truth, so dose it out a step at a time. First it was to be a 6-week recov­ery. Then 3 months. Then 6 months. Now 12 months?! The good news is that I’m get­ting pretty close to a point in which I can return to work, though I’ll still have to do a lot of stand­ing and walk­ing through­out the day.

Once I thought about the full 12 month recov­ery time­frame, though, I actu­ally felt bet­ter. If it takes 12 months for the nerve to regain all of its abil­i­ties and for the pain to stop, that means I shouldn’t feel too badly for where I’m at right now. At 4 months post-surgery, I’m actu­ally doing pretty well. The strength in my left calf has con­tin­ued to increase and I’m able to sit for more 45-minute ses­sions dur­ing the day.

I feel a bit relieved that I shouldn’t expect to be healed by now. I’m only one third of the way there in terms of time. I just need to con­tinue to do my exer­cises and have faith that I’ll get there. I should expect some days to be worse, but know that this is just what a nat­ural recov­ery looks and feels like.

While it can get quite dif­fi­cult at times to believe I will one day be back to nor­mal, enjoy­ing a full day with­out any pain or reduced mobil­ity, all I have to go on at times is faith. That doesn’t always feel like enough. But it’s all I got, so I bet­ter keep it. I’m just get­ting sick of hear­ing George Michael sing, ‘Cause I gotta have faith.’

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