I read the surgical report of my back surgery in its entirety yesterday. It’s a play by play of everything that went on that day. When I was reading, I realize just how much more was wrong than a simple tumor and unstable spine. When the surgeon opened me up, there was an absolute mess of tumor, infection, and leaking spinal fluid. You can tell in his words that it was much more than he thought he was getting into.
The most painful part for me to read were the many nerves that were entangled by tumor. Some were salvageable by his scalpel, others were able to be minimally spared, but the scary ones were completely destroyed by the cancer and left leaking my spinal fluid into my lower back.
The description of tying these off with silk thread and cauterizing them explains the numbness and tingling I live with daily now. I’m not happy about that. Doing this, however, meant choosing longevity of my life for my family over my use of these nerves and that is a choice I would make any day. Those open nerves leaking spinal fluid would have provided a path for cancer or infection to reach my brain. For the surgeon making the choice to stop that in its tracks, I must remember to be thankful.
I have a lot of respect for all of the medical professionals that worked on me that day. Reading about it highlights just how lucky I am to be here and have any quality of life at all.
Thank God for that.
–Captain Seth