First I was afraid, I was petrified. That’s the opening lyric to one of the most love songs of all time, I Will Survive, sung by the [inaudible]. Those words rang true for Gloria. She faced a major spine surgery as well as a stent in the ICU. Please welcome Gloria Gaynor and her spine surgeon, our friend, Doctor [inaudible].
So, Gloria, so glad to have you. You’ve been through a lot, and before we peel back all of those things you’ve been through, how are you today?
I am great. So much better than I was.
Let’s go back to the time before you feel like you feel now. Let’s go back up to the symptoms that you were having that led you to have to see Dr. Melamed and [inaudible]. What was going on with you and your health?
Well, overall I was fine, except I couldn’t walk. Okay, not fine straight. I had a surgery 20 years ago, and they put these brackets in my back where my back was supposed to curve, but it made me walk bent forward like that. And I don’t forget, I was doing a performance in Atlantic City, and people were coming, I was walking through after the show, walking through the hotel to get back to my suite, and people were coming up to me, say, “Oh my goodness, Gaynor, that was wonderful, this was great,” blah blah, building up my ego. I’m feeling so great, this, they loved it, as is wonderful, this is what I wanted. And one woman came running after me, she’s, “Miss Gaynor, Miss Gaynor,” and here I’m waiting for another compliment, and she goes, “Are you in pain? Because you’re all bent over on stage.”
And then, so, fast-forward a few years, and now the pain has gotten to the place where I can’t walk from my bedroom to my kitchen without being in excruciating pain.
And you are reluctant to have a surgery, that’s [inaudible].
Many surgeries before. I started out in 1978, when I fell on stage and jump back up, did finish the show, went out to dinner, and came back home with the bed, woke up the next morning paralyzed waist-down. That was not fun. And had that surgery, and it was great, the doctor did a wonderful job.
But [inaudible] I can tell you that when you restrict one area of your spine, when the whole spine is supposed to move, then you put more pressure with a level above, and then eventually that has to be done, and, you know, it can just.
Well, [inaudible], can you break down for us what was going on with Gloria and her spine, and, and all the pain when she came to see you?
So I think before we go, one very important thing about what she was saying, that how she was as miserable as she was, she did not give into narcotics. That’s very important, you know, because a lot of people are in pain, they get into this [inaudible] narcotic, the opiates, and the whole opiate epidemic that’s happening, and she resisted to give in to that. So that was very important.
The issue with her was, you know, her spine. If you look at the spine, basically, it’s a whole spine model here. Normally, if you look at the spine, you see a curvature that the bottom part is, it’s, it’s not flat like this. The spine is, it’s curved at the bottom, and we all have different curvatures, and then it curves up. Goal is to keep the hip line up with the pelvis, and the way our spine curvature is, it has to do the way we were born with our pelvic anatomy. And unfortunately, you know, back in the day we didn’t really understand that when she had her surgery. So she was kind of fused in, like, a motion like that, so she couldn’t stand up straight. That’s how she was. She has to bend her hips and knees in order to come up straight. So she was kind of fused in that position. The other level started going bad, and they were breaking down and causing pressure on the nerve, you know, all, all these other issues that was happening on top of unable to stand up straight. So that was really was the problem.
And now he, or she is, like, facing a major massive operation to fix it. Like, you know, having had a bad experience before, does she want to really go through that again?
Oh, please. They were telling me all kinds of things. “We need to break your back.” Like, excuse me? Then answer to prayer, this is, this man. He’s an engineer. He’s an agent of God, he truly is, because my prayer was that God would use his hands as his own, and he
