It is officially official, I am going in for surgery on my neck. I have had pain in my right elbow, numbness in my right hand, and a horrific loss of strength in my right tricep. To show just how much of a loss of strength, I used to be able to move 70 pounds, several times, with each tricep alone. Now my right tricep has a lot of trouble even moving 30 pounds and will simply not engage at all over 40 pounds. 45 pounds might as well be 500 pounds in as far as I can move the weight, yet I can move 40 pounds 6 full tricep reps.
This has been slowly getting worse since December. I have been seeing a Chiropractor while going through the traditional channels. He managed to fix many little issues I did not know I had, but I feel a lot better in those areas now that they are fixed. If your insurance covers a Chiropractor, I recommend seeing one just for a joint tune up. Well worth the copay.
Two weeks ago I had an MRI and last Friday I finally saw an Orthopedic Surgeon. He showed me what my spine looks like and explained that the only fix for it is surgery. He looked at his calendar and saw he had a cancellation for April 19th. We had been talking and he is a body builder. Not the "get huge and compete" kind, but more of the "look fricken awesome and be healthier" kind - which is my goal. He told me he is supposed to move all his other patients up, filling in the spot, but then he smiled and said "The bodybuilding community is pretty small, we have to stick together. I am giving you the spot, just don't tell my other patients. You need to get back to the gym as soon as you can." And I suddenly had a date for surgery a scant 1.5 weeks away! I accepted the date and started the ball rolling on it.
I then talked to my chiropractor, who I had added to all the testing results so he got a copy of my x-rays and MRI. He said that is the result he expected after seeing the test results and said we would meet one more time before my surgery to go over the rest of my joints and then call it quits for now. I setup a second opinion with another orthopedic group and had that meeting this morning. Interestingly enough, due to HIPPA I actually had to authorize myself as someone allowed to receive my test results or they could not give them to me. I had done so, so I had copies of everything to bring with. The new place told me the same thing the original surgeon said, so that is that, I am headed for the knife.
Here is my expertly drawn picture of what is wrong:
Those two bumps were caused decades ago when I smacked my head VERY hard onto the bottom of the pool. What we do in our youth comes back to haunt us later. They are going to cut out the part of the bone that has those two bumps which is on the C7 vertebrae. In the process, the liquid between C6 and C7 will drain away, so when they replace the bone with one from a bone bank, they are going to make it larger and cause C6 and C7 to fuse together. They said I will not notice the loss of bend there since there is very little bend to start with.
They will cut my throat and go in from the front for this. For 2 weeks afterwards I will not be able to lift more than 5 pounds, and then another 4 weeks of no more than 10 pounds, and then most likely released for "lift as your body tells you it can handle". I am to start light cardio on day one (walking around the neighborhood), but as soon as my neck brace is off (2 weeks) I am to move to moderate cardio level (as my body allows).
So, healing is what you all came in to read about, right? I provided that information so that I could talk about healing peptides and what I am going to be taking to help me heal faster. This is a golden opportunity for me to find out if the healing peptides ACTUALLY do heal. In my next post, I will cover Pal-GHK, one of the peptides I am going to be taking.
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