On Tuesday 27 October 2009, following MRI scans Myra Jones was told that surgery was impossible on her back due to long term damage and referred for physiotherapy. After four weeks of treatment Myra went back to her Consultant to let it be known, that having had physiotherapy treatment many times for her back, she knew that the treatment she was having now served no useful purpose. At this point Myra was then referred to a pain management clinic and in December 2009 she had an L5 steroid spinal injection. This was also a complete failure.
With continuing problems, Myra's Doctor referred her to another pain management clinic at a local hospital. She had an appointment on 24 February 2010. The Consultant she saw was kind and patient, however, it seemed that he had no idea how to approach the problem but decided to try a caudal epidural steroid injection, which again failed. This took place on Monday 19 April, 2010. Six weeks after the injection, a telephone consultation had been arranged by the hospital with a senior nurse. When Myra told her that it had failed she was told there was nothing more the hospital could do. Myra has had this problem for the best part of 40 years and therefore the hospital couldn’t help.
Myra obviously was very upset. Both her and her husband Graham refused to accept that there wasn’t someone somewhere who would be able to help her. They had no confidence in the people they had seen to this point and decided with limited medical knowledge that they were all just plain wrong.
Graham surfed the net on and off for weeks to find an answer and read many crass sites, some bordering on fraudulent, before finally coming across The Spinal Foundation. It was an Archimedes moment. Graham and Myra made contact with the foundation and Myra had a two hour consultation at Congleton with Mr. Martin Knight, Consultant Spinal Surgeon, on 7 June 2010. Mr Knight was exceptionally thorough in his examination and identified the problems. She had minimally invasive surgery on 6 July 2010, where only one stitch was involved.
Her recovery initially was slow and at times painful, but after 14 weeks she has made remarkable progress and is now leading a normal life. She does still have pain at times, but very often she goes through the whole day without any. Any pain she gets now is nothing near the unbearable pain she was having initially. She has regular muscle balance physiotherapy from a local practitioner recommended by Mr. Knight.
Graham says "Mr. Knight has been amazing in the support he continues to give her and when she has been in trouble through my email he is willing to take questions and always gives a prompt reply. Myra continues to make progress and is now enjoying a reasonable life which will only continue to improve as time goes on. I am surprised that in these so called "untreatable" cases patients are not recommended to The Spinal Foundation as standard. This would have saved Myra months of pain and grief and also meant that other medical personnel were not given tasks they had no hope of solving.
I firmly believe that other patients who are considered to be inoperable because it is deemed spinal surgery won’t succeed, should be advised of The Spinal Foundation."