Tales from the Cripped

I'm gonna have dead people in me.
Well, not full dead people. Just some of their bones.
All ground up.

The Botox injections haven't worked, so, although I'm still going to go for the second round next week just to be sure, I'm now planning to do the invasive traction trial in August.


If I get relief from that (which my nsg is convinced I will, and, really, what about having pins stuck in your head and then yanked up by counterweight doesn't scream relief?), then I'll have the craniocervical fusion in December.

In all of the discussions about the fusion in the past, my neurosurgeons focused on the instrumentation part (where they'll use bars and screws to attach my occiput (skull) and first four vertebrae together. Finally, at my appointment on Friday, I asked, "Is there a bone graft done with this too?" I figured there must be, but no one had ever mentioned it. "Yup." And, where will that bone come from? (Mostly, I was just scared that the answer would be, "From you." And, really, my hips are unhappy enough in their virgin state. They don't need to be donating to other parts of me). Nope. Cadaver bone.

I'm gonna have dead people in my head and neck. How cool is that?

I hope they're good dead people. Like, I don't think I'd want any ground-up serial killer sealing up my spine.


I missed out on getting to have cow in my head due to my very conservative decompression, but I think having dead people has even more cache.