Day 2 of My Spinal Decompression Experience

Okay, I know that things like this should begin at the beginning, but the beginning happened so quickly that I barely had time to realize it had happened at all.

For the past two years, I have been plagued by pain in earnest. I've had a number of problems, one of them, since I was 17 years old, my lower back. At that time, I was diagnosed with spondelolysthesis (I may have spelled that wrong, but who cares?). Anyway, over the intervening years I've had back-attacks that have put me flat out all through my 20s and 30s and into my 40s. But since about three years ago when I was visiting my mom in Oklahoma and I put my leg on the side of the tub to shave, it has been much more severe. I had an MRI done a couple of years ago after being referred to q spine specilaist and that film revealed four herniated disks and a fragment of something lodged in the spinal column. Anyhoo, the pain was severe, but there was really nothing to be done, and, after some PT and in time, it got better, and most of the time I was out of pain. However, as time progressed, I noticed that my hands were going numb and that I was unable to stqnd for any length of time. In 2006, I injured my right knee, and that sent me on a journey of pain that culminated in my having a total knee replacement in 2007. While my back continued to hurt off and on, my focus was on my knee for about a year. Then, as my body realigned and readjusted to incorporate the change from the titanium knee, my back began to deteriorate further. Now, and for the past two months, I have been in pretty much constant pain. In desperation, I went to a place I heard of by looking in my Google mail called "Spinal Relief Centers." It is a franchise that is all over the US and also in Canada. The doctor who has it here in Western Washington is Jeremy Meadows, DC. I wrote for information on the process and received a bunch in the mail. Several bunches. And emails as well. Finally, because I was at the end of my rope with Sports and Spine medicine, and rheumatologists, I decided to go and see what it was all about. What I found out is that it is a mechanical process where the vertebrae are opened up by using a machine called a DX9500 so that the discs can heal themselves by having better nutrition and circulation. Okay - there's more to it than that, but those are the very basics. The reason I am writing this blog is because this process is not cheap. My treatments are costing $7,061 and that expense had to be paid by me UP FRONT. I have good insurance, but this process, for all it's promise, is not covered by that. And, I was unable to find a word about Dr. Jeremy Meadows, good or bad, that was not on a website being paid for by him. I did have Doc Meadows checked out by our docketing manager at work and he has not been sued by anyone in this area, so already we're ahead of the game I guess. However, since the treatments are so costly (with the "discount" and the break for cash payment it comes out to be about $250 per treatment), I thought it was a real shame that I could find no independent information about it on the internet. So, dear reader, I'm providing that service for you. I'm going to be seeing Dr. Meadows and his DX9500 for the next 8 weeks, and, during that time, I'm going to write down my experiences and impressions and how the treatment is working for me. It is my sincere hope that it DOES work for me, and that I am able to reclaim a good deal of my quality of life that has been lost to pain.