Switching Shoes

For the past two years, family and friends have been praying for and walking beside us as we battled CLL, tackled a stem cell transplant, and have made it successfully thus far to the other side.  Now it is time for Paul and I to switch shoes.  He will now take on the patient shoes and I will be wearing the caregiver ones…though not nearly as splendidly as he did!

Next Thursday, August 1, Paul will be going in for a Transverse Posterior Lumbar Interbody Fusion between L4 and L5.  (I hope I get this right.)  The operation takes approximately three hours to perform and hospitalization is usually three to four days.  The Fusion involves adding bone graft to an area of the spine to set up a biological response that causes the bone to grow between the two vertebral elements and thereby stop the motion at that segment.   They also insert a cage made of either allograft bone or synthetic material (PEEK or titanium) directly into the disc space.  Screws and rods will be used to provide immediate stability so that pain is minimized and immediate ambulation is possible.  The recovery from this operation is six to nine months, the end point being when the bone fully heals and your have returned to function.

So, several prayer requests here.  First of all, please pray for successful surgery…from anesthesia to the surgery itself, no nerve damage, etc.  Please pray for Paul…that he would be able to rest in the knowledge that God has this…just like He had me.  Please pray that the surgery would work.  There is an 80% chance that this will work.  We would like to be in that 80%.  We won’t know that for a while after the surgery.  Please pray for me as his caregiver.  I am not as strong as Paul was for me, but I am confident that I am strong enough!  Please pray that God will provide all we need health wise, energy wise, and any thing else that is needed to take care and move through rehabilitation.  Please pray that Paul would be able to rest.  He can’t sleep through the night. 

He is scheduled to be home from work for six weeks.  He will have a back brace for four to nine months.  He’s looking into new hobbies to pursue like learning to play his dobro.  Pretty sure he won’t want to play Phase 10 every day!  :) 

Our journey again takes a different turn.  Maybe one of these days it won’t be headed for a hospital…but as long as we’re headed in the same direction, I guess we’re doing ok.

Tamara