Family heirlooms come in many forms, from antiques to jewelry to a beloved christening gown.

Paul’s Northern Kentucky family passed down an heirloom of yet another kind: a legacy of faith and trust in the Mayfield Clinic & Spine Institute. Over the years, several members of Paul’s family have sought help from Mayfield’s caring and highly trained spine surgeons, a tradition that allowed the family to maintain an active and pain-free lifestyle. Paul, along with his father, mother, wife, father-in-law, and other relatives, all benefited from state-of-the-art treatments for spinal conditions ranging from herniated discs to scoliosis.

Paul lives pain-free today, without medication, following years of reccurring pain caused by a herniated disc in his lower back. A self-described “apostle” of the Mayfield Clinic, his activities today are unrestricted and unlimited.

“I continue to jog occasionally,” says Paul, who is in his 50s. “But more importantly, I recreate with my children. We snow ski. We water ski. We hike, kayak, swim, and play golf. We can do whatever we want. I enjoy showing them the things that I enjoyed growing up.”

There was a time when Paul feared that he would be forced to give up those activities.

“When I turned 30, I began having some back pain,” he recalls. “At first I didn’t know quite the extent of it. I would rest a bit, it would seem to recede, and I would go back to my normal activities.”

Paul remembers one incident in particular, when he was out jogging during a summer rainstorm. “I turned around to come back, but when I stopped to turn, it felt like something snapped. I walked back to my office and showered, and I distinctly remember that moment being a trigger point.”

Over the next 20 years, periods of severe pain occurred more frequently. Paul began seeing a sports medicine physician, who prescribed pain medication. Then, about 10 years ago, Paul developed severe, disabling pain.

“At that point, I didn’t feel that the sports medicine doctor was able to remedy the situation,” he says. “The medication wasn’t solving the problem; it was just masking it.”

Apprehensive about his future, Paul consulted with his father, who had undergone surgery many years earlier at Mayfield and who was a friend of Richard Budde, MD, a Mayfield physician and the inventor of neurosurgical instrumentation.

“My objective was to go to the best physician possible,” Paul says. “Knowing who the best is involves effort and research, but once you know, then the travel distance is immaterial. This isn’t like going to the dentist or your primary care physician. I was looking at spine surgery, with someone operating near my spinal cord. So for me, the distance was immaterial.”

In the end, Paul didn’t need to travel far. Confident that Mayfield was “the premier provider in this region,” Paul made an appointment. His Mayfield surgeon, who has since retired, conducted a careful exam, ordered an MRI, and outlined Paul’s options. “He gave me choices, and from those choices it was easy to make a good decision,” Paul says. “For me, the decision was to have surgery.”

Indeed, by this time Paul was in misery and unable to get through the workday, as a bulging, severely herniated disc pressed on the adjacent spinal nerve in his lower back, an area that doctors call the lumbar spine. When a lumbar disc herniates, the gel-like material in the disc’s center bulges or ruptures through a weak area in the disc’s outer wall.

“I couldn’t stand,” he says. “Two weeks prior to my surgery, I would go into work and then come home after about an hour. I couldn’t function. Medications were prescribed, but they didn’t alleviate the pain. When I was asked to describe my pain on a scale of one to 10, I said, ‘It’s a 10, because I can’t do anything.’ I had to crawl to the bathroom. I couldn’t imagine living with that kind of pain.”

During a procedure known as a lumbar discectomy, Paul’s surgeon made a tiny incision in Paul’s lower back. Using a microscope to view the disc and nerves, he removed disc material so that it no longer irritated and compressed the nerve root.

The change was immediate. “I went from disabling pain to being pain-free in two hours,” Paul says.

Since Paul’s surgery, several family members have benefited from Mayfield’s expertise in spine care:

• his wife underwent epidural steroid injections, physical therapy, and a lumbar discectomy for a herniated disc;
• his father-in-law, unable to get the complex care he required in his own community in Michigan, underwent bilateral hemilaminotomies and foraminotomies for lumbar spinal stenosis and became pain-free after 30 years;
• his mother, suffering from a twisting, decompressing spine, underwent a Transforaminal Lumbar Interbody Fusion (TLIF) in her 80s and, in Paul’s words, enjoys a quality of life that is “miraculous”;
• his father, who has since passed away, underwent a bilateral hemilaminotomy for spinal stenosis and sciatica while in his 70s;
• other family members also came to Mayfield for myriad spinal conditions.

Paul’s mother, father, and father-in-law were all treated by A. Lee Greiner, MD, a Mayfield neurosurgeon.

Today, Paul mentions Mayfield to anyone who is struggling with a problematic condition of the spine. He is still amazed that, after living for 20 years with the uncertainty of sporadic flare-ups of back pain, he has spent the last 10 years completely pain-free. “Today my problem is solved,” Paul says. “I’ve got a young family. We’re active and I have no limitations.”

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