Late afternoon, to our surprise, we received a call from Dr. Le Huec. He wanted us to come in tomorrow, but we’ll be on a train, so we arranged to go in tonight.

Sarah was feeling a little unsure about this whole surgery thing, even as we’re preparing to head back to the states. The unexpected final visit with Dr. Le Huec was a welcome surprise. We had the chance to look at the xrays to see the disc perfectly centered in Sarah’s spine, and more importantly, we were able to get some questions answered.

Questions like:

Why am I in so much pain?
Is this typical?
When is it going to get better or
What can we do about it?

Turns out, most people have this surgery before their disc is completely destroyed like Sarah’s. The doctor’s report said that her disc was more than 70% deteriorated. That’s why she’s in so much pain. When they cut the disc out, they took a small space and had to stretch it to make room for the prosthetic implant. Most people don’t need to do that.

He said about 20% of people experience this type of pain because of this stretching of the spine. It will go away, but it will take some time, and likely a steroid injection in her facet joint in her spine to make the swelling go down…

In the meantime, we need to be geared up for traveling, so a few extra narcotics and we we’re on our way.

In another surprise, when we got back to the hotel, we found out they were throwing a party for us. OK, not for us, but there is a new manager, so there is a big shindig with live music, free food, drinks and desserts downstairs. Saved us the inevitable question, “What are we going to eat tonight?”

Oh, and one last thing: Dr. Le Huec showed us the video from the Channel Six news report here in France that had a quick clip of Sarah trying to get out of bed, and a little clip of her talking with an interpreter speaking over it. Crazy. Soon as we can get it on the blog we will…