Hello
Can you give a little more info on pain killer use in terms of your medical opinion
What I mainly want to know in addition is
1) Any particular benefits of general anaesthesia over spinal? quicker to start exercising so you can maintain your muscle and mobility ?
2) Can we bear pain and avoid painkillers - heavy liver metabolism almost always ages the body and the face - which are extremely bad
3) Would you have done externals only over LON - now.
Thanks Adwards,
Malaysia boleh
General anesthesia - Actually few patients report backache post spinal which is not medically evident but still why risk it?
But with spinal theoretically you avoid much of the surgical stress to your body as compared to GA. Also spinal provides pain relief for a longer duration of time (for almost 48 hours post surgery or even more if needed) which is not the same as with GA.
A young and healthy liver is perfectly capable of tackling such stressful situations, so you need not worry about it. A good doctor would neither let his/her patients overdose on painkillers nor would he/she let his patients suffer because of pain. Every big hospital has a special clinic dedicated to just pain management. But believe me, you need to be ready for painful 48 hours post surgery if going for GA. But then again listening to stories of so many patients reporting such post-procedural pain in case of spinal, I became a bit skeptical and therefore went on with GA. Again I would reiterate here that no such medical evidence is present which points to the spinal procedure being the reason for such backaches. You can go even farther than this and call it a medical myth, a myth which I gave into and therefore chose GA over Spinal.
If you go for GA, you can choose fentanyl infusion for the first few hours and then use Buprenorphine patch along with Dynapar or PCM infusion. You can go through my diary for more.
Yes, I would still go with LON. When I made this choice I thought thoroughly and didn't choose it just randomly. So no I would not opt for pure Ilizarov's (i.e externals only) or those so-called hybrids even today.
I hope my answer would be helpful.
Malaysia Boleh