What the ????

[youngoddess]

Okay... I am 28 years old. I have Herrington rods since I was 13-14 about 1992, although I'm not very good at remembering everything. ( my mom died the year before ). I had a corkscrew and s curve. My surgery was done at Shriners in Northeast Philly. Not sure where the rods are located but inbetween my shoulder blades to above my hip..next time i go to the chiropracter i will find out. I am scared now of the pain i may have later in life, the hospital told me i would be fine...and at thirteen I believed them. After my son was born, I began having muscle spasms in the neck and shoulder area, then lower back pain. I started seeing a chiropracter who was a godsend and really helped me in these areas. He doesn't go near the rods.

Anyways....last week i was in a car accident of signifigant force and all my problems from before have returned three fold..including new symptoms...like face twitching, numbness, burning in neck area and shoulder blades, arm pain and so on. I recently started reading about all these issues people are having with these rods. I love this forum, because i know i am not the only one. It has been wonderful reading all the support and information on here. Well i have been to my chiropracter everyday and i am getting relief but i feel like something else is going on...more signifigant. So i am seeing my Orthopedic guy tommorrow. I hope there will be some answers and relief in the future.

[janski66]

Hey youngoddess... I thought I was "all fixed" after my first surgery in 1982, I am 40 now and had the old surgery with the Harrington rods, they probably already did it better by the time you had yours in 1992. I know exactly how you feel, I felt let down when I started developing more problems.
The thing with scoliosis is they are developing better ways of correcting the curves as time goes by and they see the long term effects of surgical techniques.100years ago we all would have just spent the rest of our lives in wheelchairs until the curves progressed to the point of no return...so the decisions we made to get our backs fixed to increase our quality of life were not completely fruitless.
Since you were in an accident I would definitely find the best scoliosis surgeon that you can and find out what is going on and as soon as you can.
Have you gone to your regular doc or had any x-rays? it might be a good idea
if you haven't just to make sure nothing shows up, and if nothing urgent shows up it might just ease your mind a bit. Just don't panic, I know it's hard...hang in there

[sweetness514]

Hi Youngoddess,

so sorry to hear about your accident. If you feel that you are in pain still after a few weeks I think you should get an Xray done for peace of mind. I know what you mean about thinking that you were fixed and okay, I feel the same. I had my first surgery in '97, not that long ago and after years of exercises and patience I thought all was good in my back, only to find out I had pseudarthrosis after my rod broke and basically all my screws were loose from rreading my medical report, not fun. Nothing showed on Xrays or bone scans, only when they opened me up again. I also had two other surgeries(that means three in the last 8 years) and still my ortho thinks it's normal that I will always have some pain b/c my right rod is not stable and he fixed all he could.

I know it can be discouraging, but the way I see it when I'm positive is that we did what we knew best with the knowledge we had. I wish I would have held up a bit more, to at least get info from this forum before getting surgery and I know that every year they learn more and more about complications from these surgeries and how to make us deal with them and pain.

Good luck to you, hang in there.