The Doctors – Surgery on Roller Derby Athlete

My name is Linda and I’m 32 years old and I’ve been competitive and playing sports ever since I could remember. In the last year I’ve picked up roller derby. I am the jammer, and as a jammer I get hit quite a bit and usually get knocked on my butt.

Six weeks ago I got hit pretty hard and thought nothing of it. I woke up in the morning and I had excruciating pain in my lower back that was radiating down my right leg and into my toes. It just kept getting worse and worse. The pain was getting pretty much unbearable. After seeing Dr. Melamed, he suggested that I take a few painkillers, but after if nothing really helped, he suggested surgery. Being completely sidelined is devastating. I’m hoping that Dr. Melamed can get me to a place where I can compete again.

Linda has a disc fragment that’s completely broken off and it’s completely pushing on the nerve here. The goal is to try to fish out the fragment. First, we’re going to make an incision a little less than an inch. Now we’re gonna go down getting to the fissure here. Now we identified the fissure, so we’re going all the way down already to the bone.

We gotta x-ray to confirm, to make sure we are in the right location, and this is exactly where we want to be. It just gonna clean it up and then we’re gonna start drilling here. There was a hole through the disc. I can see where the tear was. I could feel something that gives right there. That’s the fragment right there.

We removed the fragment now successfully. We control all the little bleeders and now we’re closing her up. One last stitch here. Linda should be good to go.

Let’s speak to spine surgeon Dr. Hooman Melamed, joins us now. And first things first, this was a less invasive surgery than a full spinal fusion.

That’s right. You know, Linda’s case, she had what’s, what was living with what’s called a pars fracture, which is the fracture of the bone here, but that wasn’t her problem. Her problem was there was a little disc herniation that was out, and the disc herniation was actually underneath the bone here, making it much harder to get to. So it has to be like very microscopically try to go get the fragment. Otherwise she would have needed a fusion. Most other people would probably offer the fusion.

So you were able to go right to the area of concern. And what’s really cool, why I want everyone to pay attention to this, is this was one week ago. One week ago, if she’d had that big surgery, she’d still be laid up, but this is one week later and Linda’s here and she’s going to show off her new strut. Linda, come on out.

You went from having excruciating pain, so how do you feel now?

I feel amazing. I actually felt my leg minutes after I woke up from the surgery, which was eight weeks coming.

Wow. I mean, you know, we saw all the jabbing and stuff that you doing in the rink. So will she ever be able to go back to roller derby?

Absolutely. Her mom doesn’t want to. But you know, mom keeps telling me not to do it, but I’m like, all the moms know it’s fun. I can’t tell her that. You’ll have, absolutely, she can do whatever she wants.

So how soon ‘til she can get back in to the rink?

She can probably get back within, you know. We’ll start physical therapy. The key is, you know, it’s not just the operation. Afterwards you got to give time to yield this to heal and then start them on a core and chunk stability. By, I think by three months she should be able to do, to get back to everything.

We are so happy.