The Daily Mail – First-Time Surgery Gives Woman Renewed Hope

We want to talk now about a young California woman’s new lease on life, all thanks to a remarkable first-time surgery that gave her hope when a terrible martial arts injury left her with excruciating headaches and chronic neck pain.

I took a taekwondo class in college. I got paired up against a guy who was like six two, and I’m five two, and he just, like, kicked me so hard, and it threw me across the floor, made me black out. Got up and I was like, oh my gosh, like, I was crying.

25-year-old Lauren Butler says that incident was the start of a three-year nightmare. At first doctors told her she had whiplash and prescribed pain pills for her injuries.

Made me, like, feel a little bit better, but, like, didn’t heal anything. I did massage therapy, physical therapy, shots in my neck to try to, like, help the pain. I did, like, pretty much everything you could do besides have surgery.

It took a year for Lauren to get approval for an MRI, and when she did, she was told…

You need surgery, like, your discs are all messed up.

Beginning in March of 2017, Lauren underwent two separate surgeries within a year, doctors fusing two different levels of vertebrae in her neck. It was also discovered that Lauren had been born with yet another level of fused vertebrae. Unfortunately, after the surgeries, Lauren had a numbness in her arm when she ran or turned her head. Lauren also had a limited range of motion in her neck and still had pain, plus headaches and trouble sleeping.

It just hurt all the time.

Lauren was in Ohio when all of this happened, but she moved to Anaheim for work two years ago. There she researched and found Marina del Rey orthopedic spine surgeon Dr. Hooman Melamed, who was shocked after reviewing her case.

My jaw dropped. I was like, wow. There was like one sheet of bone, basically.

Humans only have seven neck vertebrae, so another fusion was out of the question.

She’s already miserable, and she would have been just a lifetime of permanent pain, disability, limited motion, unable to have a normal life.

Dr. Melamed proposed a surgery that’s never been done before, whereby he would break apart Lauren’s fusions and put in artificial discs, telling her…

You can basically live a normal life if we can’t recreate that anatomy.

Lauren agreed to this surgery that requires exact precision, with the doctor working dangerously close to a main artery.

I’m talking like a millimeter away, the big red, the vertebral artery, which is one of the main arteries that goes into your brain and supplies your brain. So that was nerve-wracking.

Nerve-wracking for sure. But in the end, the surgery a complete success.

I was beyond thrilled, and it was, like, the best feeling. I’m really happy with results. I have not had any neck pain or, like, stabbing down my arm. I’m able to work out and go on hikes, and, like, I don’t get terrible headaches, and, like, I can sleep normal, and I got my full range of motion back, and, like, I could look up and down, like, everything is normal. I don’t even know what could have happened if I didn’t find Dr. Melamed. I’m so happy I found him.

Dr. Melamed says he takes an integrative, holistic approach to medicine, focusing on lifestyle and nutrition, and does not prescribe narcotics. Now, to learn more about the doctor and his philosophy, you can check him out on his website at spinepro.com.