Neck Pain Patient Gives Thanks To CINN Neurosurgeon & Staff

From the beginning, my boss, Lake Co Commissioner, Gerry Scheub, recommended Dr. Karahalios and CINN. But I figured if you go to a surgeon, YOU are having surgery and I wasn’t ready yet. I tried steroid injections and physical therapy, all the while in PAIN. By March 16th I had appt. with Dr. Karahalios. I was ready to stay that DAY! He understood the pain I was experiencing and ststed I was a good candidate for an artificial disc. With the help of the CINN staff and Eric Giradot,P.A., we arranged surgery for the 20th of March.

Immediately upon waking from surgery, I KNEW my neck/shoulder/arm pain was GONE!

I have recouperated well from surgery itself and I am so happy to be out of pain. Gerry and I continue to recommend CINN and Dr.Karahalios, WE know how great we feel now.

Thank you!

Claudia

 

 

Cervical artificial disc topic of radio interview today with Dr. Dixon

Dr. Dixon, CINN neurosurgeon, will be featured in a radio interview today with Lakeshore Public Radio discussing the cervical artificial disc as a new treatment for stubborn neck pain.  In addition to providing an overview of the procedure and the symptoms the technology can remedy, Dr. Dixon will invite listeners to join him in a free community education event tomorrow night at Centennial Park in Munster, IN from 6:30-8:00 p.m.

CINN Patient Shares Story of Pursuit of Proper Diagnosis & Optimal Treatment

Part 1

 

I was referred to Dr John Helfrich, a neurologist at Christie Clinic in Champaign, Illinois, because for the past thirteen years I had slept no longer than 90 minutes at a time. I am a 51-year-old professor at a Big Ten university, 6’5″ tall, mentally and physically active. I would fall asleep easily but soon awaken, so my nights were a series of naps. I was fatigued during the day and frequently dozed off.

I had sought medical help many times over the past decade. I passed from doctor to doctor, including two psychiatrists and a psychologist specializing in biofeedback. I had been given antidepressants, although I had no symptoms of depression, dopamine agonists, though my legs didn’t seem restless, and a gamut of sleeping pills. My turbinates were surgically reduced to help me breathe at night. Nothing helped.

A sleep test showed I awoke whenever I entered REM, the restorative phase of the sleep cycle. I had a few sleep apneas over the course of the night, but they were mostly central apneas, the type associated with disruptions of the nervous system, rather than the normal obstructive variety.

For someone with a healthy lifestyle, I was dealing with a discouragingly long list of medical issues. I had frequent headaches and nearly constant jaw pain. Gaps developed in my lower teeth and they moved in front of my upper teeth. My dentist sent me to get braces and I was suffering through orthodontic treatment.

I was aware my carbohydrate metabolism was failing. After eating, I became sleepy. Two hours later, if I didn’t eat again, my blood sugar would plummet and I would fall into the symptoms of an insulin reaction. I tried to compensate by eating small amounts of food periodically around the clock, avoiding simple carbohydrates.

I exercised one to two hours a day, biking, walking and lifting weights, and watched my diet, but gained three or four pounds each year. Losing weight, formerly easy for me, had become especially difficult and I hired a weight loss coach to help. My diastolic blood pressure rose sharply and my resting heart rate was unusually high for a physically fit adult.

A colonoscopy eight years earlier had revealed a 3-cm cancerous polyp, but it had not spread past the stalk and was successfully removed. Colonoscopies in subsequent years revealed seven more polyps, mostly precancerous.

The previous year the fifth metatarsal in my right foot snapped unexpectedly. The fracture didn’t heal for months and a scan to find out why revealed low bone density, although I had no risk factors for osteoporosis. An endocrinologist diagnosed me with low blood calcium and hypercalicuria: my kidneys were shedding calcium into my urine. I had had a total of seven kidney stones.

Part 2

 

When I entered Dr Helfrich’s office, he was looking not at a file or computer screen, but at me. “You have big hands,” he said as he shook my hand. He gave me a physical exam and asked if I had always been big boned. No, I said, as a young adult I was skinny, but lately had become

barrel-chested. My face had changed appearance: my jaw was square and nose and forehead broad. He noted the enlarged pores and adult acne on my face, my skin tags and the scars from removing sebaceous cysts.

“I want to test you for acromegaly,” he said, explaining this was a rare condition in which the pituitary gland produces too much growth hormone. A blood test for IGF-1, a metabolite of growth hormone, showed an alarming level for someone my age, 674 ng/ml. The number should have been in the 100s. Dr Helfrich ordered an MRI of my pituitary gland, which revealed a tumor 12 mm across, much larger than the pea-sized gland it had grown from.

The tumor had developed from a secreting cell and was spilling growth hormone into my blood, raising my blood pressure and heart rate. It had impaired my carbohydrate metabolism, because high levels of several of the metabolites of growth hormone, molecularly similar to insulin, were playing havoc with my body’s mechanism for regulating blood sugar.

The hormone had caused my jaw to broaden and lengthen, necessitating the orthodontic treatment, and my hands to enlarge. It spurred colon cancers to grow and caused my kidneys to spill calcium, thinning my bones and giving me kidney stones. And for the past thirteen years it had killed my REM sleep.

Part 3

 

Dr Gail Rosseau, the brilliant neurosurgeon at Chicago Institute of Neurosurgery and Neuroresearch who is a leading candidate to be Barak Obama’s Surgeon General, together with Dr Stephen Becker, a head and neck surgeon at Northwestern University Hospital, planned a transsphenoidal approach to the tumor. It had grown against my right carotid artery and was pressing against my optic chiasm, causing visual disturbances.

Dr Becker removed my septum and cut a passage into my sphenoid sinus. Dr Rosseau passed an endoscope up through my nostril and cut into my brain cavity. Looking through a flexible microscope, she extracted the tumor, bit by tiny bit. She was aiming for a complete removal, to deter re-growth, while taking care to leave a functioning pituitary and avoid nicking my carotid artery or optic nerves.

I spent the night in intensive care and the next morning was removed from the morphine pump. My braces had been causing intense pain for almost a year, but even with the morphine withdrawn the jaw pain and headaches had disappeared. I declined further pain medication: I was in less pain after surgery than before.

The next night, the nurses awakened me hourly to check my condition and take blood samples. Still, it was the best night of sleep I had had in over a decade! In the morning I removed my bandages, showered, and dressed in my street clothes. When Dr Rosseau made morning rounds, I told her I was ready to go home.

“This man,” she announced to her entourage, “had brain surgery less than 48 hours ago!” I was released from the hospital that afternoon. Three and a half weeks later I returned to teaching my classes.

Part 4

 

Two and a half months after surgery, Dr Helfrich had trouble picking me out in his waiting room. With my jaw not swollen and nose less broad, my face had changed shape. My skin was no longer coarse and oily, and my acne had disappeared. My carbohydrate metabolism returned to normal immediately after surgery. No longer needing to eat every two hours, I had lost twenty pounds without special effort. Even my eyes had changed color, from light green to deep brown.

The IGF-1, the indicator of growth hormone levels, in my blood had dropped from 674 to 133 ng/ml. My blood pressure had fallen from 130/100 to 105/70 and my resting heart rate from around 90 to about 65. My blood sugar and glycolated hemoglobin levels were optimal and my serum calcium normal; I was no longer was at risk of diabetes, or further thinning of my bones.

I was sleeping uninterrupted six or seven hours a night and felt invigorated during the day, never dozing. My mucus membranes shrank and I no longer snored. My allergies disappeared. I had had not a hint of a headache since surgery and my braces, now painless, would be removed soon. I was using seven prescription medications before surgery, but now I took only a daily multivitamin.

I need to be vigilant against cancer, because acromegalics develop the disease at four times the rate of the general population, and take care to avoid injuring my thinned bones. My cardiovascular system took a beating for more than a decade, so it’s important to maintain my blood pressure and cholesterol at optimal levels.

Four months after surgery, I was with my children in the Netherlands Antilles, learning to SCUBA dive. In a five day trip, friends and I will soon traverse “The Maze” in Canyonlands National Park by mountain bike. I send my doctors a lot of flowers.

(The patient)

April 4, 2009