Day 31 Substitution symptoms and surgeon who believes!

Well I'm on Day 31 of SEP and feeling good about that. As my back pain has lessened, my activity has risen, but the substitution symptoms have kicked up in my body, my tinnitus is louder than ever, having more insomnia episodes and I now have this crazy eye strain in my left eye to distract me. I do know its TMS so trying to be patient. Still working on the repressed emotions release, some progress I would say as I kept waking at 4:00am extremely hot and sweaty and fully enraged, angry. It finally dawned on me these were those repressed emotions surfacing so I acknowledged that( maybe for the first time ever) and realize they are out in the open now at least. The way these feel is so dark and scary, scarier than any pain or injury. Substituting to pain subconsciously makes more sense to me now, even if illogical, as they are such powerful feelings, that pain is like a walk in the park compared to dealing with the repressed rage and anger. I also finally had my second consultation with a new surgeon I was referred to, after new MRI and Cat Scan, I was so focused on actual impingement only because I know I have TMS, and could care less about the degeneration, scoliosis, structural deformity etc blah blah blah. I told him of my back pain improvements due to reconnection with mind body work. He was quite open to it and thought that was great, he would never want to do the big scoliosis/fusion surgery I was told I'm a candidate for, unless we both felt it was totally necessary, that was nice to see and hear from a medical surgeon. But I do now need another Cat Scan on my neck as the x-rays and MRI, (Cat Scan was only done on my back, not neck) showed a benign bone cyst on C7 joint. Its quite huge and close to the spinal cord. If Cat Scan is conclusive and he feels its important to address, this would entail a "cut/chisel out" of this bone spur growth, which truthfully does not scare me and I don't feel is against TMS belief and findings, it might even be actually reasonable to assume its the cause of my minor neck soreness and crunching noise I hear in there. Well that's it for now, still a lot of work to do with new symptoms and these friggin personality traits that keep me in "life avoidance mode", "indecisive" and "defensive posture", lol. Come on TMSers you know what I'm talkin bout!

 

Hah, Brant - yes we do!

Yeah, sometimes you have to take care of physical stuff. An actual bone spur can be cut out - what you probably can't determine is how much your brain has been "using" that area to create more pain than is actually necessary to warn you about the spur - if that makes sense. Since pain is created by our brains when areas of the body send a message that something is wrong (like a break or a burn, for example).

Anyway, your surgeon sounds like he's following the path of Dr. David Hanscom, a back surgeon at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, whose blog is reposted here on the forum, and who encourages his pre-operative patients to go through his "Back In Control" program. His goal is to have those patients cancel their surgery after they've completed the program, and the last time I read his blog, he was at 40%, which is pretty awesome.

Find his "Back In Control" blog reposted here: http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/forums/mindbody-blogs-was-practitioners-corner.15/ (Mindbody Blogs (was Practitioner's Corner))
Or his web site: http://www.drdavidhanscom.com/ (Back in Control - David Hanscom, M.D.)