Wow, it has been a long time since I posted on here. A great deal has happened in that time. I'd guess I'd call all of it good. Maybe not good, but at least insightful. So rather than leaving it hanging, I'll very quickly summarize those things that have gone on for the last eight months.

In late February, 2009 I decided that I was sick of the pain that my back injury had been causing me, and I laid off from work. The good news is that this injury was work related. The bad news is that the City of Seattle would become involved in approving my surgery and many other aspects of my patient care. It took over two months to get approval for the surgery.
In the mean time I'm sitting there feeling sorry for myself that my life had been totally rearranged. I finally got the word that surgery was approved, and had surgery on May 11, 2009. Ouch. Needless to say, no one took the time to really describe to me the pain and difficulty in recovering from the surgery. My MRI had indicated that I had a small disc protrusion, but it was in the worst of places. It was jammed right up against my vertebrae, and to remove it required removal of a portion of my back bone. Nice. I ended up getting a laminectomy, a microdiscectomy and a Foraminotomy. I'll describe those in greater detail later, but the bottom line is that it was not a simple procedure. I've had many of my firefighter buddies just tell me to get over it and get back to work. Not so easily done.
Tomorrow is three months. And my back is still killing me. I'm saddened to say I think it might actually be worse now than it was before the surgery. Either way, I'm still in a bunch of pain and it has consumed much of my emotional energy. Daily I fight feeling despondent, wanting to just quit trying. Most of my hobbies are physical in nature. I find it very hard to do those. No wakeboarding, limited weight lifting.