After a month of waiting and distracting myself with video games, my surgery date was finally upon me. What I failed to mention was the way the surgeon reduced the risks. They achieved this by splitting the surgery into two parts. I was going to be given what they called halo traction. For gamers, that sounds much cooler than it is. It is not like Halo at all. I would have preferred to become a Spartan than go through traction.
Halo traction is where they drill a device into your skull and gently stretch a severely curved spine over a long period. They do this to reduce the trauma of straightening it all at once.
I went into surgery, and when I woke up I had a circular band of metal screwed to my head. It took a few days to get used to and caused a lot of pain in the beginning. I woke up in more pain after that than I did after my next surgery, an extensive spinal fusion. After the first day, they added weight to the pulley system that made traction work. This allowed the spine to stretch.
They added a pound each day until they reached half of my body weight.
Being strapped to this contraption twenty four hours a day was frustrating. If I wanted to move from one spot to another, I needed a nurse to shift the weight between my bed, wheelchair, or walker so my spine remained in traction. I once waited twenty minutes to use the bathroom, but that was not the worst of it. The kicker was something no one saw coming. I could not get most food down.
Whenever I ate, food would get stuck about halfway down my esophagus and stay there until my body decided it was time to throw it up. This added to the torture. It went on for a week, and not being able to eat caused even more stress because I was losing weight. That was terrible because I was already severely underweight, which the doctors were not happy about.
There was a risk they would put in a feeding tube or move my second surgery back, leaving me in traction even longer.
They sent me for a test to see why I could not get food down. That was not pleasant either. I had to drink a chalky liquid that I struggled not to vomit. The test came back normal and inconclusive. Miraculously, after a few days, I could eat again and started consuming an extra thousand calories a day so I could leave as soon as possible.
I was ready to go home, and I still had about two weeks before my second surgery.
You may wonder how I got through this time. I escaped from reality and looked to the future, when all of it would be over. No matter how many times I was beaten down, I would rise again and keep pushing through. That is the key to living your best life. I learned it from video games and implement it in my life every day. I knew I could get through this. I could get through anything.
I was fortunate to be a VIP patient and could get a PS4 as an escape from reality. I played a lot of Call of Duty and connected with a cousin I had rarely spoken with because he lived far away. It was the best thing to come out of the whole surgery, other than not dying, of course. My nurses would come in while I was murdering zombies, and some would sit and watch me obliterate my enemies for a few minutes. They often fought over getting on my schedule because I was such an easygoing patient. I wanted little. I just wanted to play my games.
The days went by, and they gave me great news. Because of my progress and good reaction to traction, they could move up my surgery. Some bad news followed, which I took well because I did not yet understand its full extent. I was so ecstatic about leaving traction that I did not fully consider what I had been told.
Little did I know how much the end of traction would foreshadow the way I would feel inside my body for the rest of my life. However, that is a story for another day.