My name is Christian. I’m 20 years old. I’m a student athlete at the University of Memphis. I’ve been playing softball my whole life. My back pain started when I was 16. My high school softball team was competing in the state championship, and I felt a pop. And I played through it. I rested a couple weeks and it was gone. A year later it came back.
I’ve tried everything from medicine to shots to rest, bracing, none of it’s worked. The pain is constant. There are days where it hurts to get out of bed and I can barely walk.
The very first doctor we thought that I’d had some disc problems. We went to another doctor and they said, you know, just rest. Next doctor told me there was a pars defect and a pending one on the other side. The next doctor wanted to do a fusion.
I’ve spent hours on my computer on Google researching the pars defect. One day on The Doctors they had a segment on the roller derby lady that had had a pars defect, and Dr. Melamed is who had done the repair on it.
So this was a a less invasive surgery than a full spinal fusion.
That’s right.
He did an exam on Christian that I had never seen. Then he had her walk, he had her bend, he had, he pulled on her legs. And when we walked in and that was the first thing he did, I thought I just happened to find the right one in this instance.
Emotionally, missing softball has just been excruciating. Being able to potentially have softball back is more than I could ever dreamed of.
Now that Christian had a solution, it was her turn to go under the knife.
I’m feeling a little nervous, but just excited to get in there and get it done.
She has stress fracture. You see there’s a crack right here. So what we’re going to do is place a screw in there, a hook at the bottom here, clean this out. Then, on the other side, she’s getting some pain. It’s because of this little bone spur that’s hitting the nerve right in there. So, we’re going to clean that out.
Here we go, making an incision here. We’re going to be very careful here because the… You don’t want to destroy the capsule and the normal anatomy. You want to preserve all that intact. So, we’re getting over the pars fracture is all this… Usually, there’s a lot of a fibrous tissue. So, there’s a hole right in there. That’s where the the defect is. We’re going to drill all that out and clean it out really well. We have the screw ready. So, this is the screw that’s going to go in now. Put it in. It doesn’t have to be a big screw. We just want something to hold it.
The microscope is amazing cuz you get to see everything you’re doing. There’s going to be a rod between the hook and the screw, and it’s going to be squeezing it in together. We’re going to squeeze it in together to hold the fracture basically that we created. We’re going to compress here. Okay.
Bone grafting. This is perfect. This is nice and powder. This is the best form. Help her to heal.
This side is done. We’re going to go on the right side. We’re just cleaning out the bone spur and shaving it down. I took the least amount of bone, and I wanted to give this as much structural stability so this thing can go on and heal itself on the right side. Everything went excellent.
Orthopedic spine surgeon Dr. Hooman Melamed joins us along with Christian and… Christian, I’m going to cut to the chase, which is how is your pain today now that you’ve had the surgery?
Well, before surgery, I was dealing with on a daily basis probably between like a four and a five on the pain scale. And at my worst days, which were rare, but I did have them, it was it was probably an eight. Now, it’s a zero, maybe a one on my bad days.
So, so, you look at Christian now, she’s saying her pain is zero to one, which I know is huge. But the other thing is you love softball. And and we love student athletes on this show. And and you want to get back out there, right?
Absolutely. That would be the best thing that could happen.
So, begs the question of our good doctor here. What what is her prognosis, and and and how long till she can resume potentially her playing career?
Well, it’s 3 months right now into it, and we just had a CAT scan actually on like few days ago, and it shows the bone is starting to heal and it’s starting to mend together, but it’s not healed enough for me to say go ahead. And that’s the thing, a lot of times the athletes come back too fast. The timetable is basically another 3 months, we’ll get another CAT scan to make sure it’s healed, but then even if the bone is healed, you can’t just jump into it. You got to build up your core, trunk stability, your balance. You got to build the torque in and get back. And that’s the key thing. A lot of people from the injury, they heal, they don’t do the proper rehab after.
And especially she’s not feeling in pain, she may get back out…
That’s exactly right.
