BACK from doctor. Still questions

I met with the doctor today and told him how the last two weeks have gone. Basically, my pain has been greatly reduced and most of the time I’m out of pain altogether. I’ve had a couple of days where my leg pain was there all day long (although I was still able to go to work, etc . . .) and I also had some back pain when I did something to aggravate it (sleeping funny, or playing a game with the kids where we were crawling on the floor, etc . . .) . I wouldn’t want to live long term in this condition, but it is much better than before. I can go to work and mostly function this way, but I would like to get back to where I can run, play with the kids and be more active.

As I expected, the doctor didn’t encourage me to do the surgery. He said that it was basically about how much pain I could tolerate and what I wanted my quality of life to be like. He said to keep living life and when it gets to the point that it isn’t improving and I don’t want it like that anymore, come back and see him. It is basically up to me what I can handle and what quality of life that I want. My kids are still young and I have a lot of life to live so I want to fix this problem sooner rather than later if I can.

He said that it is possible that it would get totally better, but I figure that this isn’t very likely given my history.

I’m trying to get with a US doctor through my brother-in-law who is an orthopedic surgeon.

Also, I had trouble communicating with the doctor at the appointment. His English is adequate, but he struggles in communicating the more complicated things. I didn’t feel like I could ask all of the questions I had because he wouldn’t fully understand them. His answers were fairly simple because he didn’t have all of the words. This makes me lean towards trying to get this done in the US. Also, since my back is feeling better, I’m sure I could make the trip without too much trouble.

Continue to pray that we will have wisdom.