Since Gayle went off her family leave, I took Jeff to his appointments last week. One was his check up with his neurosurgeon and the other for disability. The neurosurgeon greeted Jeff cheerfully and was generally upbeat on his progress. I mention this because he is not known for his cheerful disposition. He was encouraging and generally pleased with Jeff's progress. Being the curious type, I asked what exactly was done during surgery.
Not knowing what the terminology means, it was explained that one disk was removed and the other trimmed. In order to do that, they have to remove part of the lumbar vertabrae on either side of the disks. I was trying to better describe the process, but after looking it up in google, I am better off just saying they had to remove sections of the vertabrae to get to the disks. So he is missing one disk.
When asked what that means in terms of his functioning and long term affect, his disposition returned to normal and gave me a vague doctor-ish answer, which means you just don't know. But he should be able to function ok with those parts missing and modified.
One observation, while in the waiting room for both doctors, it was obvious that Jeff is an anomaly. The average age of the patients waiting made me feel quite young. Most of them thought I was the patient until they saw jeff walk with the cane. The look of surprise was familiar even from the drs. staff. One of his doctors described his condition as one of those you read about in text books but never see. Another doctor modified that statement by saying you don't read about this even in textbooks. Im not sure what to make of those statements.
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