Mutually Assured Destruction

For those of you who follow these things, I'm having another MRI on Saturday morning, of my cervical spine (i.e. neck) and brain. The spine scan is to check in on those next two disks, C3-4 and 4-5. These are the two disks above the ones that were removed and replaced during my surgery two years ago. (Has it been that long?) At the time, the disks looked pretty crumbly, but the surgeon said that nobody likes to fuse 4 disks at the same time -- makes it more likely that the fusion won't hold. Last year, my MRI showed that those two disks were looking pretty bad. The surgeon said something like, 'I don't think we have to do anything about it now, but in a year or two we'll probably need to go back in there.' So, now it's a year later. I'm a little trepidatious about what they're going to find. Considering that visiting someone in the hospital now makes me break out into a cold sweat and getting an IV gives me a panic attack, I'm not looking forward to more surgery, even though intellectually I know the surgery isn't that bad and the recovery is do-able. Besides, I'm in for more surgeries in the future no matter what, so I may as well get ready to suck it up.

As for my brain, they figured they'd throw a brain scan in there while I'm in the tube, to check to see if I've developed any of those telltale lesions that show multiple sclerosis. I've pretty much decided (no matter what they say) that I have some kind of weird, mutant MS that just isn't fitting their careful parameters for what the disease is, so I don't know that I care whether the scan shows any lesions. Either way, I feel rather vigilante about the whole thing. These docs are caring and well-meaning, but they seem very limited in their viewpoint by lists of diagnostic criteria and protocols for treatment.

I am no new-agey, holistic-medicine devotee, but I've just kind of decided that for all their brilliance and kindness, the neurologists are of limited use to me now. It's up to me to work with my body to try to help it heal, or at least to reach detente. You might know that feeling of being "in" your body versus fighting your body every step of the way. I am working on being in my body. I am very sensitive to changes in my body -- I knew when I was ovulating, I feel a migraine coming on very early, I can tell when I have allergies versus a virus, I know the weather by the state of my knees. But I often look at my body as the adversary. Time to make friends, or face mutually assured destruction.