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Old 09-25-2017, 03:53 PM
annapurna annapurna is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Posts: 1,668
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At the risk of a flip answer: you should retain a much fitness as you can and make a decision about your long-term solution.

I'm not going to push you into surgery. The approach you wish to take is your own but delay isn't helping your prospects for a successful surgery, of whatever type you choose to have. I'd argue that as soon as you see a steady decay in your capability and health, it's time to make a decision about surgery. That decay will speed up and slow down over time, but it's really unlikely to see that decay stop and not continue without some kind of external intervention.

It's also easy to miss the decay when you think about acute events but you need to think about how many things cause flare-ups. More now than earlier? Do the flare-ups last longer? Do you need to rest more or longer to recover? Does the pain-free time between flare-ups seem to be getting shorter? It might take a talk with your wife and a calendar to see if the two of you can plot when your flare-ups had occurred to make some guesses about whether you're holding steady or getting worse over time.

If it helps, I had to help Laura with that talk for her L5-S1 because she'd gotten so caught up in dealing with the problem and addressing the pain that she'd lost sight of how bad she'd gotten over the year between diagnosis and ADR surgery.
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Laura - L5S1 Charitee
C5/6 and 6/7 Prodisc C
Facet problems L4-S1
General joint hypermobility

Jim - C4/5, C5/6, L4/5 disk bulges and facet damage, L4/5 disk tears, currently using regenerative medicine to address

"There are many Annapurnas in the lives of men" Maurice Herzog
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