Originally Posted by
SwtBadger
Same, ran track and cross country in high-school, kept on running and by my mid 20s couldn't walk without a noticeable shuffle and could only go up stairs a 1/2 step at a time. Picked up biking to stay active, but only been "serious" the last 5 years.
Good news is that the back somehow healed itself, slowly over a 5-15 year period without surgery. At one point I tried to break it good by playing 2 hours of fairly intense full court basketball every Saturday - somehow that seemed to be when it started to get better.
That’s an amazing story with a great outcome!
I was 54 and looking forward to aging up in the local races, when I started getting electrical shock sensations in my arms when I jumped or went up stairs. Being a neurologist, I knew exactly what that was and the MRI showed my canal down to about 4 mm at one level. Sailing season just ended and I stupidly started training again and eventually dinged my cord, went numb, etc. I bought myself a C6-7 fusion and prosthetic discs above and below, a real deluxe job that conventional opinion considered too aggressive for someone so
OLD and the discs were only FDA approved for single levels, so it was an off-label use.
However, I was fortunate enough to to end up at Walter Reed with the guy who was handling all the spine cases from OEF/OIF and was used to dealing with fit, strong, people and had the balls to be aggressive instead of fusing everything and leaving my neck immobile, which the guy at the Bethesda Naval Hospital offered to do. Thats also what likely would have happened in the private sector, even though two neurosurgeons I know said that’s what they would want if they needed 3-level surgery and one of them said their partner had actually gone to Europe and paid cash. Military medicine can really suck, but there are pockets of real quality. The guy has since gotten out and gone to George Washington.
Anyway, it’s been great and those two steel joint are the only reason I can still ride a 4” seat-bars drop and look up well enough to to trim the mainsail in a race. My hands and feet still tingle and the hardware sticks into my esophagus and makes it hard to swallow some things, but I’m very happy.