Surgery

Richard had his "shock therapy" today, what they actually did was put needles in him and shock his nerves with electricity, I have had it done before and it hurts! although he says it did not hurt as much as the dicogram he had last week (to read about that horrible procedure you can go to my family blog site Anderson family news) anyhow all the test are showing his problems are with discs L3 and L4, so the nuro surgeon recommends surgery to shave off part of the disk and relieve the pressure on his nerves. He is set to have surgery next week, it is only about an hour surgery and one night in the hospital, though he will need to take about 6 weeks to fully recover afterwards, he seemed relieved to know they will finally do something about this for him, the initial injury that started all this happened about 13 years ago while he was stationed in Korea so it has been ALONG time with a lot of pain for him. We got lucky and the Army and Tri Care are letting him have it done by a civilian doctor in Salina (about 50 miles away), we are pretty impressed with the doctor, and much more comfortable having him do the surgery rather than having it done on Post at the hospital there., simply because this doctor has about 15 years experience with this sort of thing and has moved it all along very quickly since his first appointment a couple months ago.
The doctor seems to think he will be able to do sit ups and walk fine afterwards so his Army profile will be updated and he will be able to return to regular duty, which is what he has been working towards since we decided he would stay in another three years, so all in all it is good news. Now we just need to get through the surgery, even though it is very routine for this nuro surgeon it is still surgery so there is always a bit of anxiety before having something like that done.