Tomorrow I’m
having surgery on my back. To be honest, now that I’m less than twelve hours
away, I’m a little bit scared.
In contrast,
since finding out the results of my MRI scan three days ago all of my thoughts
have been wishing away the time, wanting it to speed up so I could get this
operation over and done with and crack on with my rehab. Every day waiting I
considered a wasted day, another day taken off the other side in my race to be
fit for the Hockey World Cup starting in 93 days.
Unfortunately I’m
no stranger to back problems, and this will be the second operation on my back.
Just eleven months ago the disc that sits between L4 and L5 in the vertebrae
decided to finally give up after having been prolapsed since 2006. By giving up
I mean it ruptured, and the exploding fragments started causing havoc by floating
around my spinal cord and pressing on the nerves going down my legs. The pain
was just excruciating, a dull ache lingered constantly all the way down to my
calf. A sharp pain intermittently made it impossible to get comfortable,
leaving me tired, drained and often brought to tears.
After four months
I successfully made it back to playing hockey, but now it seems the same thing
has happened. When the doctor called me with the results I completely and
utterly lost it. I was in physio and I don’t think she knew what to make of me.
With tears streaming down my face all I was thinking was, that’s it, my
career’s over, I’ll never play again!
As it turns out there
was some confusion over which disc had ruptured. It was confirmed the next day (after
a really bad nights sleep) that it was in fact the same disc as last time, I
literally breathed a sigh of relief and sensed another rehab challenge on my
hands.
With just one
more sleep to go my thoughts move away from rehab and anything to do with
hockey. It’s weird really, I guess it’s because it’s back surgery, it makes it
feel a bit more serious. All I want is for it to be okay, for my surgeon to say
to me when I come round that it all went to plan and I can start to rebuild
once again.
You can find out
more about me and my plans for this blog by clicking on the ‘about’ tab.
