Six years ago, a car going 60 miles an hour T-boned… Most of the doctors said that I need to learn how to live with chronic pain for the rest of my life, and I decided to have that surgery. Through all of the accident, I never gave up, and I always smile, and I always put my makeup on, but this back surgery [inaudible].
If you’ve ever had persistent back pain, you know it can be exhausting, but imagine if you had to live with your back at a 45-degree angle while in excruciating pain. Well, that was the reality for Beverly until she met orthopedic spine surgeon Dr. Melamed. Let’s have a look.
I first met Beverly, I believe it was in July of 2012. The first time she walked in my office, she was literally hunched over. I immediately knew what was wrong and what needed to be done. The medical term is called a flat back deformity. The spine has a natural S-shaped curvature from the side. In her case, her five bottom levels here were fused together. She was now basically flat like this, so that’s why her head was here. She was hunched over.
In order to create the normal curvature of the spine, you obviously have to restore that alignment. This is a very complex and dangerous operation. You know, most spine surgeons don’t do this. The day of the surgery, I go and remove the original hardware, and I’d like to put in a little bit thicker screws. And once you put all these screws in, you expose the spine, then that, that’s the time when you start thinking about the procedure of breaking the bone.
So you actually take the big piece of pie out, and that helps to collapse the bone. And then the other levels are just little [inaudible] in the bone that helps a little bit of a correction, and it all adds up together, and the whole thing helps to correct, realign the spine. I think it took about eight hours from the beginning to the closing.
Dr. Melamed joins us. Thank you, sir, for being with us.
You know, flat back cases, they used to be very common in the older days where we didn’t really understand spine surgery, I’m talking like maybe 20-30 years ago. But as time has gone, we understand spine surgery a lot more, so you don’t see as much. I’m a little bit more biased because I’m seeing more of it. I’m getting more referral to fix these kind of problems.
Walk us through what you’re doing here.
So the area you see, is the shaded area, is the bone to be removed. That’s the angle, the wedge you’re gonna take out. The screws going above and below to stabilize the spine. You expose the nerve and the spinal cords, you protect it, then you protect the spine in the front as well, and then you put your rod to stabilize it. Then you come with the chisel, we remove the bone around the nerves, and then you slowly, that helps to collapse the spine back down. The spine, you can see, comes back, and you can see how the curvature is starting to get restored. It has to do with the way you take the angle of the bone away.
Wow. All of that curvature, it’s the, the curvature of the spine we talked about before in the show. There’s three parts of your spine: cervical, thoracic and lumbar. And we actually have some x-rays.
Yeah, x-rays, if you want to take us through [inaudible].
We have her x-rays before surgery and then after surgery. So the x-ray on the left is the one before the operation. This is looking at her from the front. She has a little bit of a curvature, you can see, but that wasn’t him her main problem. You can see she’s tilting. Well, that wasn’t the main issue. The one on the right, you can see she’s completely straight now.
So you’re seeing one curvature, but there was the other curvature as well, because [inaudible] her to basically be in a 45 degree angle forward. I mean, literally, because the spine was like flat now, so her upper part was now basically bending over this way. So she was basically completely hunched over.
Are you correct, corrected in a way to curves?
Because it’s, it’s all compensation. So what happens, that when you bend over like this, a lot of times the patients start doing this to look up straight, and that starts, they start getting [inaudible] something is wrong with the neck, but there’s really nothing wrong with the neck. It’s actually the lower part that’s a problem. So you fix the bottom part and it’s fine. The rest of it kind of realign itself.
