In about 2010 I injured myself shoveling snow. It was a big year for snow and there was a lot of shoveling. It felt pretty serious at the time, I yelled at a doctor, and did some physical therapy and thought that was that. Nope. Over the years something would happen and my back would seize up and take me out of action for days or weeks.

I started working with a specialist, who gave me better physical therapy, better meds, and did some imaging to figure out what was wrong. I had significant damage to the disks in my lumbar spine, L3-S1 to different degrees. You can google “degenerative disk disease” for more information. Still, it was intermittent and we could take a conservative treatment approach. Wait and see. That worked until sometime in 2023.

In 2023 my back got worse. It was no longer intermittent, it was all the time. I couldn’t bend over, I couldn’t lift anything, everyday it felt like I was on the edge of seriously hurting myself and doing some real damage. It was time to stop waiting. My spine doctor agreed. So, we did a lot more tests and imaging. The lowest joint, L5-S1 was in very bad shape, the others were damaged to different degrees. There’s a whole list of diagnostic codes and medical words.

The short version is that I had surgery at the very start of 2024 to fuse the bones from L4-S1, and replace the disk at L3-4. This involved one surgery that went in from the front to remove damaged tissue and install hardware to hold those bones in place. This is also when the replacement disk was installed. Two days later I had a second surgery to install some screws and a rod in the back to further stabilize the bones.