The APF Video Project

Ellie

Ellie’s medical odyssey started many years ago, even before she settled into her stressful job on Wall Street. She spoke candidly about the difficulty of working in a “high end, high stress job” in the Big Apple, citing the many ways in which her chronic back problem was made obvious to her co-workers. These examples are familiar to you spine patients working in corporate environments:

- sitting at a meeting table, then getting up to stand because of the pain;

- hoping to hide the pain on your face, but finally realizing you can’t fool your colleagues.

- converting your office environment into a standing work station;

- trying to take the edge off the pain with NSAIDs.

Working through the problems of pain management in 2002, she tried Vioxx, then increasingly stronger anti-inflammatories. Those remedies were ineffective. During this time, she was advised by her doctors to consider a two-level IDET procedure and she took the advice. The IDET procedure eventually made things much worse, so she then tried everything from physical therapy to magnets to moxibustion to manage the pain!

Eventually, she learned from her doctors she needed additional surgery. When one doctor recommended a multi-level lumbar fusion, she sought opinions from physiatrists, multiple neurosurgeons and others…followed by MRIs, CT scans and discograms. After speaking to fusion patients who were “not happy campers,” she decided fusion was not right for her. For her, the notion of lumbar fusion meant adjacent level degeneration down the road — and implied more fusions at other levels of her spine. This possibility motivated her to explore motion preservation procedures that she heard of from one of her “forward-thinking” doctors. She eventually decided on “ADR.”

Then began the battles with her health insurance company, requiring all her discretionary time and energies. Even though she had a successful three-level lumbar ADR (L3-S1) in Germany in 2007, her battle for reimbursement for the procedure continues to this day.

Ellie is recuperating, slowly but surely. Unfortunately, she does have other health issues, including: sacroiliac pain, thoracic herniations, knee problems and a dislocated tailbone. Coincidentally, her son recently had ADR with another German clinic. There, one neurologist noted his unusual symptoms and asked if he was ever tested for Lyme disease — making Ellie question if her myriad joint problems are related to any of this Borrelia burgdorferi business. Even today, she still wonders…