Here I sit bored and lonely in my hotel room with my Dad snoozing away, I have nothing to do so I’ll tell you all about my day.
So only after getting jerked around for the last 3 months by the insurance company, [tag]SCIF[/tag], I had another appointment today with the surgeon I had seen back on July 17th. This time my Dad came with me so he could meet the surgeon. We discussed the surgery some more, and set a date for the procedure.
For those wondering what the name of the surgery it is called; Anterior Cervical Diskectomy and Fusion with Instrumentation and Allograft Bone C5-C7. This pretty much means in English, they are going to go through the front side of my neck, operate using a microscope, remove the disc material from the 2 areas, and carve out a 1cm notch in each vertebra they took the disc material from, and place cadaver bone in the spaces, finally placing and anchoring a titanium plate like thing to hold it all together. All this should take around 2 hours and leave a small? scar he told me.
The surgery is going to take place on Monday December 3rd, 2007 around 7:30 AM at the Irvine Hospital. (This is cutting it relatively close to the expiration date, 2007.12.11, SCIF had set for my surgery) After my surgery; I’ll have to stay in the hospital for at least 1 overnight(so everyone come visit me please!); in the state for at least a week as I won’t be able to drive or travel home to Arizona, and have follow up visits with my surgeon every 2 months for a couple years to follow.
Hopefully before?/most likely after the surgery, my status will change from Permanent and Stationary back to Totally Temporarily Disabled, which will mean I will have money for a place to live in California(fingers crossed). As most of my friends know, for various reasons, living in Arizona makes dealing with my injury quite difficult. With assistance from my friend Neil, today I did go checkout an apartment where I can live and keep my dog, but it’s all the way up in West Los Angeles/Westwood area, which is way far away from my friends and [tag]Primary Treating Physician[/tag] in Orange County. Alas I have never been able to find a place to live with my dog since I had to move from Irvine at the end of 2003.
Not that many read this blog… but ANYONE reading this who knows of any roomate openings or apartments without dog breed restrictions in Orange County please let me know!!! I am on a relatively short time frame for moving, again hopefully before my surgery.
OK, I’m done rambling on and on for now. Hopefully Saturday, tomorrow, will yield more apartment possibilities. We’ll be looking around the Long Beach and surrounding areas.
[tags]interview, medical, spine surgeon, allograft bone, titanium plate, anterior cervical diskectomy, fingers crossed, Orange County, California, travel, thoughts, Los Angeles, friends, dog breed, apartment search[/tags]
