So the wheels have been set in motion for my back surgery.

I met with the surgeon a couple of days ago and told him the nerve block wasn’t blocking out my nerves too well, and, as I mentioned in my last post, I’m not willing to spend whatever time I may have left shuffling around in pain. Let’s do this!

He agreed that all nonsurgical methods have been explored, and this really is the only way I’m going to get any relief.

He’s aware from our previous conversations that I do a bit of MMA training, and he knows that I really don’t want to be away from it for any length of time. He used to train himself years ago, and knows that if you’re away from it too long, it’s tough to get back up to speed.

So he told me Tuesday that he’s going to do the minimum amount of surgery that I need to relieve my problem, which is the open discectomy  that I wrote about previously. This would require only a day or two in hospital, and I wouldn’t be laid up a significant amount of time.. The absolute minimum, he explained, would be endoscopic surgery, but that may be only a short-term solution in my particular situation.

More intense options would be fusion or disc replacement, which would pretty much be overkill, and stretch my convalescence time out way too far for my taste.

(Keep in mind as I explain this that I tend to hear doctors the way dogs hear humans in that Gary Larsen cartoon:

which is to say, it mostly goes in one ear and out the other. So if you’re reading the above exchange and thinking the doc doesn’t know what he’s talking about, don’t; I might be remembering the conversation incorrectly.)

Anyroad, the surgery will be done sometime in June (“Everybody wants it done in June,” he said when I made my request). He’ll have to check his schedule and get back to me with an exact date.

The first step, though, is pre-admission testing, which is all sorts of blood work and so on. I report to the testing station on May 17.