anterior cervical discectomy with fusion
In the early morning hours of Friday, December 4, my mom fell out of bed at her home outside Tacoma and fractured her spine near the base of her neck, knocking a vertebra out of alignment which then pressed on her spinal cord. She was unable to raise herself off the floor and could not shout loudly for help. My dad was in the bathroom at the time, and although he didn’t hear her at first, he was at least awake, so when he discovered she had fallen, he was able to call 911.
An ambulance took her to a hospital in Tacoma first, and then she was moved to a more advanced facility in Seattle. There, they first had to sedate and put her in traction to realign her vertebrae, and then they operated to repair the fracture and put in a plate so that they could fuse vertebrae R5 and R6 to it in order to stabilize her spine. (The procedure is called an anterior cervical discectomy with fusion.)
The surgery went well, and she’s now recovering in the hospital. She’s alert and talking, but her motor skills are still severely limited (not able to stand, walk, feed herself, etc.), so she’ll be spending about a week here, and then move to an in-patient rehab program for a few weeks to try and regain more motor control. Unfortunately, she’s been the primary caregiver for my dad who is mentally impaired from a heart attack six years ago and who needs round-the-clock supervision.
So right now, I’m taking care of my dad at their house and ferrying him back and forth to Seattle each day so that he can spend time with my mom. My younger brothers are coming to town in the next several days so that we can tag-team taking care of my dad, but this is only a temporary solution until we can figure out a care situation for him while my mom recovers. Even with a “full” recovery, she was already stretched thin being his sole caregiver, so some sort of assistance needs to be figured out, whether it’s in-home help or a complete transition to an assisted living facility.
It’s very jarring given that we had just visited them over Thanksgiving and Mom was the picture of health for a 68-year-old, hitting the elliptical at the local YMCA on a regular basis. So our entire family has abruptly entered a new phase in our lives whose parameters are still largely unknown.
I thought about, but ultimately rejected, the idea of documenting all the details of how our lives have been whipsawed. But to the extent that anyone has noticed a lack of online social activity from me…now you know why. And I commend you for reading this far. I have no takeaway from this for you—feel free to come up with one on your own.
