Cervical Laminectomy

So, I’ve not been posting much because in two days, my Mom goes under the knife for spinal surgery. That would be a hairy item to face in any event, but in this case the procedure itself is pretty astonishing to me.

Mom was pretty active and independent in her youth (and still is) — to the point that if something needed lifting, she’d just lift it rather than wrangling her husband or one of her boys into doing it. Place your hand on the back of your neck, then trace down to your shoulder. Feel that continuous line of muscle? Well, when you lift something with your arms, instead of your back and legs, the pressure ultimately runs up that muscle line to your cervical (neck) vertebrae. Over the years, you can end up crushing a disc or two from accumulated pressure.

In my Mom’s case, she also has some bone spurs growing towards her spinal column from the inside of the front half of her cervical vertebrae. If nothing’s done, they’ll eventually push on or poke into the spinal column itself and paralyze or kill her.

Now, the normal thing to do in this situation is go in and clean out the bone spurs, then put everything back the way it was. But because the spurs are not very accessible in her case, that can’t be done. So instead, the docs are going to remove the back half of her first four or five vertebrae, and then close her up. This will give the spine room to move as the bone spurs grow. They’ll also fuse a couple of the vertebrae to make up for the loss of bone-mass support.

What’s boggling my mind is that after the surgery, there will be nothing between the back of her neck and her spine except an inch or so of skin and muscle. But apparently, this is a pretty common procedure, and people heal up just fine.

Ain’t modern medicine wonderful?