I decided to take some time off to try to enjoy the holidays.I felt I had spent my whole year spinning my wheels, being miserable with my health problems and the aggravation from the insurance company, and very little to show for it. I wanted to have at least some time without worrying all day every day what was to come next. I resumed my search for treatment including new options in late January, 2006. I was happy to find a couple of things that were available to me that I had not really considered before.
One was surgery in Germany I found out that many other people that were in the same boat as me were mortgaging their houses, emptying out 401K's, their savings, taking out loans, etc to finance their way to Germany to have one of the worlds most renowned spine surgeons do the procedure on them. Dr Rudolph Bertagnoli was one of the first surgeons in the world to do this procedure and has done thousands of them over the past 25 years. He takes patients from all over the world on a cash payment basis. Surgery in Germany is considerably less money than it is here. At the time after the money exchange it came out to be around $35,000 for the surgery, trip and stay there. Unfortunately our finances could not stand the additional burden at the time. Now I think back and wish that maybe we had taken the plunge. Of course hindsight is 20/20. I was considering this but it was last on my list due to the financial burden.
I also found out in the meantime that there was a surgeon here in the US that was performing a hybrid surgery one level fusion and one level ADR that was being approved by insurance companies for the most part. The patient might have to pay for the disc itself which cost $4,000 but this was much better in my eyes than paying $35,000 and being out of the country for 3 weeks.
So I found a patient advocate in Mark with Global Patient Network. He helped me get all my records to Dr Fabian Bitan in New York and I consulted with him later. Dr Bitan told me that at the time he felt I was a candidate for the surgery and that he was willing to do it once I was ready to go ahead with the procedure. I was not able to travel to New York until June as no one could care for my children here for two weeks so I had to wait until they were out of school.
In the meantime, I continued going through pain management. One of the things I found that really helped my chronic pain and sciatica was a radio frequency ablation. This is a procedure that is done under sedation where using guided imagery, the physician goes in and burns certain nerves coming out of the disc spaces. This can stop the pain response from going to the brain. It can take anywhere from 6 months to one year to start to grow back so a person can get long term relief from sciatic pain with this. This helped me for a period of about 10 months before I noticed that type of pain coming back again
However, since there were several components to my pain generators, the pain management physician had to use a combination of treatments in order for me to be able to even function during this time.
Image courtesy of kwest19 at stockxpert.com
Blog Catalog Women's Health
One was surgery in Germany I found out that many other people that were in the same boat as me were mortgaging their houses, emptying out 401K's, their savings, taking out loans, etc to finance their way to Germany to have one of the worlds most renowned spine surgeons do the procedure on them. Dr Rudolph Bertagnoli was one of the first surgeons in the world to do this procedure and has done thousands of them over the past 25 years. He takes patients from all over the world on a cash payment basis. Surgery in Germany is considerably less money than it is here. At the time after the money exchange it came out to be around $35,000 for the surgery, trip and stay there. Unfortunately our finances could not stand the additional burden at the time. Now I think back and wish that maybe we had taken the plunge. Of course hindsight is 20/20. I was considering this but it was last on my list due to the financial burden.
I also found out in the meantime that there was a surgeon here in the US that was performing a hybrid surgery one level fusion and one level ADR that was being approved by insurance companies for the most part. The patient might have to pay for the disc itself which cost $4,000 but this was much better in my eyes than paying $35,000 and being out of the country for 3 weeks.
So I found a patient advocate in Mark with Global Patient Network. He helped me get all my records to Dr Fabian Bitan in New York and I consulted with him later. Dr Bitan told me that at the time he felt I was a candidate for the surgery and that he was willing to do it once I was ready to go ahead with the procedure. I was not able to travel to New York until June as no one could care for my children here for two weeks so I had to wait until they were out of school.
In the meantime, I continued going through pain management. One of the things I found that really helped my chronic pain and sciatica was a radio frequency ablation. This is a procedure that is done under sedation where using guided imagery, the physician goes in and burns certain nerves coming out of the disc spaces. This can stop the pain response from going to the brain. It can take anywhere from 6 months to one year to start to grow back so a person can get long term relief from sciatic pain with this. This helped me for a period of about 10 months before I noticed that type of pain coming back again
However, since there were several components to my pain generators, the pain management physician had to use a combination of treatments in order for me to be able to even function during this time.
Image courtesy of kwest19 at stockxpert.com
Blog Catalog Women's Health
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