[RabidJ]

Hello everybody, I appreciate this forum since I have been able to gather quite a bit of information to help me make a good decision.

I am a happily married faithful man with two children ages 5 and 3. It is for my family above all that I look to improve my back pain situation. So again, thank all of you for your stories and information. I am looking to document my story for anybody who may be helped by it.

I am 36 years old and have had back pain for about 18 years now. I am not exactly sure where all of my pain started but I believe that it could have started from a high school football game during my senior year. My “pain” did not really start off as pain but more like a certain type of discomfort in my back. As a very young man at the time, I didn’t think anything of it and figured it would just go away. It never really did go away.

Although the discomfort never went away, it still never kept me from living a very active lifestyle. In fact, shortly after I graduated from high school, I enlisted into the U.S. Army. I have no regrets for serving my country and feel very proud to have done so but while I served, I put my body through a lot physically. I served in the Middle East, went to airborne school, air assault school, IOBC, etc.

I have had several “episodes” through the years where I have been put out of commission because of my back. Back in 2011, I had enough and decided that I need to pursue some sort of procedure to relieve my pain. I had to take a whole lot of time off of work and ended up getting a discectomy in February of 2012 by Dr. Anthony Yeung in Phoenix, AZ. I do not recommend anybody see this doctor. His bedside manner is terrible and I’m not so sure that he is a good surgeon since I didn’t do as much research at the time as I should have. Of course, at the time, I was desperate. My sciatica did subside after the procedure but another pain on my right side (hip/butt area) surfaced after the procedure.

I was able to manage this pain for the last 5 years until this last January. For some reason, my pain mounted to the point where I was having trouble getting out of bed. Walking has also been a problem although when the “wheels feel greased” I can get around a little better. Mornings, evenings, and nights are most difficult.

I will attach my MRI report from the Veterans Affairs. I am suspicious that maybe the report does not report all of the symptoms of my back since I question the competency of the VA. Also, the VA gave me a cd with my MRI images on them but I do not know how to download the images to my computer.

With all of that said, I have begun to look for what could be a possible solution for me. At this point, I do not know if I’m even a candidate for ADR but would prefer this vs fusion. I will be seeing a Veterans Affairs surgeon on May 31st for information purposes only since there is no way I would let him operate on my back. I expect that he will want to give me shots in my back or prescribe me pain medications. I will report back on this.
I have also reached out to Dr. Rischke in Switzerland via email and will be seeing him at some point in the near future since I will be moving to Europe for at least a year to be with my wife’s family in France.

The two discs that seem to be the best based on testimonies are the LP-ESP and the Axiom Freedom disc. M6 scares me because of some testimonies and ball-and-socket discs make no sense to me since our back doesn’t work this way. Does anybody on this forum know who does the Freedom Lumbar disc? I know the Jamaican Doctor, Kingsley Chin, does it but does anybody know of doctors in Europe that do it? I believe Dr. Rischke used to do it but I think he now uses the LP-ESP.