The saga starts on Friday the 18th, in to hospital for a fusion that involved jacking apart two vertebrae that had been sitting atop each other since a couple of laminectomy (disc reductions) ops.
After lifting them, they got stabilised with a screw-on cage holding an insert. All set back down, some bone paste gets slathered in and it should all knit as one in three months time or so. Arthritis and advancing degradation made this inevitable and the chances of success will not improve by waiting (and aging).

Anyway, discharge on Sunday afternoon with various exercise, post-op, and behavioural instruction, I made it to Wednesday before a massive sciatic nerve revolt in the right side resulted in my returning to hospital complete with being carried out to the gut-bucket thereby becoming the talk of the neighbourhood. After another stay, back home yesterday evening.

So now we are working out the issues of both sciatic and sacral nerves and how the muscles in my legs and pelvic floor have been compensating since the initial spinal compression injury, surgeries some 25 years ago, and what changes with this one. The level of this nervous system reboot has caught everyone by surprise, but my surgeon has reacted very quickly to the situation after doing some quick consults with folks who have dealt with the nerve side of this.

So now in my case the structure is solid. The strength is returning quite nicely and everything is square and true. Now we let the nerves sort themselves out after years of adaptation to the damaged structure and especially those nerves that had been impinged upon that now are refiring rather angrily and randomly. This will no doubt take a while as it sorts, some anti-inflammatory meds and muscle relaxers the chemistry de jour rather than pain-killers.

Talking of the latter, I'm off painkillers and an alternation between tylenol and ibuprofen is handling it well.

So now we work through it all patiently and see what the nerves and muscles settle down to. Right now it looks to be a three or four month span to see what we have and then decide if there is any issue of nerve impingement in the new structure we might have to go in and tidy up.