Revision Surgery Scheduled

My revision surgery has been scheduled for March 9! I'm both excited and nervous about it. I'm excited because I feel confident in the surgeon's lead placement plan and at the prospect of finally getting some pain relief from this whole ordeal. I'm nervous because the recovery was pretty hard last time and there is the prospect that the stimulator won't be effective at all.

My neurosurgeon and stimulator rep agreed that the best lead placement for me would be the traditional occipital placement, but slightly higher. The traditional placement is 2 octrodes placed in a "v" shape over the occipital nerves. They're placing them higher on my head in hopes to get coverage to my auriculotemporal nerves. I had a similar placement for my trial on the right side & it provided much better pain relief than the placement I currently have.

They will have to reopen all of my incisions down to my battery pack. My leads are super long and plug directly into the battery pack, eliminating the need for a connector and wires between the leads & battery pack. So they will remove the current leads, place the new ones, and tunnel them down to the battery pack. I will have some back discomfort again from the tunneling process & from the battery pack incision.

I've been meaning to blog more in the last few months about resources available to those of us who are mostly house-bound, but my pain levels have been pretty high and I've found it hard to concentrate. Hopefully I'll be able to write another entry before the surgery. If not, I'll report as soon as I can how it goes.