(written on the 24th & 30th)
I forgot to mention in the last post that I got the results from my cervical MRI. They accidentally screwed up and sent me the results of cervical MRI three times instead of sending the results for each of the different MRIs, so I’m headed to take care of that today as well.
The cervical MRI report showed bulges at four of the seven discs, mild bilateral neural foraminal stenosis at one of the vertebrae, and mild to moderate neuroferminal stenosis on one side of one of the vertebrates, and severe neuroferminal stenosis on the other side of that same vertebrae.
First thing in the morning, I reached out to the office again and let them know that they accidentally sent me the wrong links, giving me the same one three times.
Gratefully, it didn’t take them long to send correct links for the other two MRI reports. Unfortunately, however, though the lumbar report seemed to be complete, the thoracic report was missing data on half of the vertebrae. 😒
I also noticed that the MRI report for my lumbar spine was missing important information that was contained in previous lumbar MRIs. For example, in previous lumbar MRIs, osteoarthritis was noted in multiple vertebrae, and that’s not something that goes away, so it’s either going to be the same or worse, likely worse, so it should have been noted in the report.
Additionally, my lumbar spine has also had reported that my pedicles are congenitally short. That’s kind of a big deal, and it should be noted in the report, but it wasn’t.
It was important to me to find out whether or not I had congenitally short pedicles throughout my entire spine were just the lumbar. Same thing with the osteoarthritis. I’m wanting a complete picture of my spine and not just some details from this one and some details from that one.
So my Lumbar spine was incomplete in comparison to previous MRI reports. What it did mention Was that I have bulges and four of the five discs, mild bilateral neural foraminal stenosis in three of those four vertebrae, mild to moderate neuroframinal stenosis in the fourth one, and spinal canal stenosis in one of the five vertebrae.
The report also mentioned that I have a straightening of my lumbar spine, which is… not happy.
The thoracic spine report only had data on six of the 12 discs, so that’s… not great.
In the six discs that were referenced in the report, five of them had protrusions, two of them impinging on My spinal cord, Aunt mild to moderate bilateral neural foraminal stenosis in four of those six.
I’m certainly not a radiologist, but there are patterns that don’t make sense in the reports, So I’m going to have The reports and images looked at by other radiologists and doctors to try to get a fuller picture of what’s going on.
Though I don’t have a full picture yet, what I do know from the reports is pretty discouraging.
Of course, I knew there were significant issues given all the pain and those issues that I have.
I wish I knew what caused them.
To be honest, just reading the reports is discouraging enough that I am not even motivated to try and figure out how to help myself.
I just… don’t have much hope anymore.
Just sort of seems like why should I try? Things are never going to get any better anyway.
That might well be false, but that’s baseline sentiment.
Anyway, I drove back over to the MRI place to get the CD of all the images because they had trouble saving them to the disk yesterday when the MRIs were actually done.
While I was there to pick up the disc, I showed that copies of my previous MRIs, of which they made copies that they sent to the doctor reading the MRIs, along with my concerns of the missing information on my lumbar and thoracic reports.
Looking at the MRI images through the link online, they looked like pretty crappy images, so I was a little concerned. A had done research into the MRI machines they used to make sure that they were good machines, but now I was concerned because image quality looked pretty crappy.
So I headed over to my brother Jared’s place, after doing a little bit of JustAnswer work online.
Funny, but all the work that I did to aggravate my back and neck finally kicked in: It just kicked in a day late. I’m having some pretty good back and neck pain And nerve issues. 😅
Anyway, I got the files from disk transferred over to my computer using Jared’s external disk drive. My laptop is new enough that it didn’t come with a disk drive.
With the files transferred, that means I can send them to other doctors to look at, so that’s good. I also noted that as I’ve looked through the individual images of each set, they looked much higher quality than the images I had access to online. I don’t know if they’re just somehow different or what, but it gave me more hope that the images were of normal quality that I would get from a hospital or somewhere else.
Jared and I chatted on his back porch for a little while about life and things, and I Don’t remember exactly how it came up, but I suggested that maybe we go hiking up Upper Falls, which he thought was a fun idea.
So after a brief bit of coordinating and preparing, Jared and I and another friend headed up the canyon, stopping first at Costa vida to get some lunch.
Neither of them had been where I wanted to take them, and it is a little sketchy to get there–in several places. After an initial steep path from the Provo River trail up to Upper Falls, it’s mostly technical from there. You wind along the cliff face One direction, climb up a little drop off and then wind back across the Cliff face, but one level up, so to speak.
Sometimes you’re far enough away from the edge that you don’t really feel it, but sometimes you’re so close to the edge that you definitely feel it. Sometimes it’s flat, sometimes you’re going up, and sometimes It can be a little scary going down with a drop off immediately to your right.
Eventually, you find yourself at the top of the lower Cascade of the two-tier Upper Falls, And you arrive at a point where the next stage is a relatively easy, but still nerve-wracking, bouldering route that takes you about 20 higher, so you find yourself at the top of The upper Cascade.
That part of the hike/climb is basically the litmus test for the rest of The hike. If you can do that, then you can do all the rest of it–at least all the rest of the stuff I was planning on doing during our hike together.
I started and climbed the route first, showing the way up.
The route is still nerve-wracking for me, and perhaps more so the older I get?
My sense of self-preservation I think is a heck of a lot stronger than it was when I was younger. Not quite so invincible, now that I watch my body fall apart in real time.
Before I even got back down, our friend was coming up– exceptionally nervous, but braving the route step by step, handhold by handhold.
It’s probably a 75° to 80° angle going up? So it’s not straight up, and you’ve got multiple places where you can just easily go from one hand and foothold to the next, but there are more than a couple places where you have to stop and think and plan, so you don’t have your hand in a bad place or your foot on too small of a foothold.
I climbed slightly below to be there to help with holds and what not, But my help wasn’t needed all that much. Mostly, I was there to help if needed, and then to be a sort of safety net if something went wrong. The hardest part is about 3/5ths of the way up where there’s a spot where you have to completely commit to the next hold of you’re going to keep going.
That was almost a deal breaker, but with a little encouragement, the commitment was given, the arms and hands found their marks, and the rest of the way up was relatively simple in comparison.
Jared was the last one up, taking a different route than I’ve taken before, and not needing any help until the very top, and only there because I told him not to trust the rope that someone else has left up there (a. Because I have a personal opinion that I believe one should never trust a rope that was put up by someone else If you weren’t there and don’t know you can trust the person who put it up. And in this case, even more so when you don’t know how long the rope has been there. And especially in this particular case because the anchor bolt in the Rock was loose. 😅
Thinking back on it now, I probably should have cut the ropes and removed the bolt so as to protect future people from getting injured if that bolt (or the rope) were to finally give way. The odds are probably pretty small that will happen, but I think it is a possibility. 😬
There’s a different route that you can take To hike/climb up, But I really like The route we took because the beauty of the experience sort of unfolds step-by-step, whereas with the other one, When you come around a particular bend, you get this huge, see-everything view, And I feel like that takes away a little bit from the magic of the incremental beauty and wonder, so to speak.
We took a little rest to let the adrenaline of the first Cliff climbing experience wear off, and then we climbed up the super mossy rocks of about maybe a 10 or 12 foot waterfall. It’s a stepped waterfall on the sides, so there’s not really much risk, just really really cold water. 🙂
Once at the top of that waterfall, you see the full view of one of my favorite waterfalls. Not favored because it’s obviously the most beautiful of waterfalls that I’ve seen in my life, but favorite because of, yes, the beauty of it, as well as the magic of it the first time I found it while exploring, and then also because of the history I have with it.
Anyway, so we enjoyed The first waterfall that we climbed up, and then this large second waterfall, taking lots of pictures and just enjoying the beautiful scenery.
From there we headed across the mini Canyon, along the side of a mini cliff, and then because of the time, made the decision to head back because We had gotten started in the afternoon, so it was already a bit later, and we wanted to make sure that we got down before light or weather gave us issues.
It had been a decent amount of time since I had used the other route that you can take to get to the same place, So I left them in a little beautiful mini Canyon At the base of a triple Cascade waterfall, And headed out to scout the way back to make sure that I didn’t get us lost in some awkward/scary situation.
It’s a good thing I did, because I did get myself in a little bit more of an awkward situation, where I had to scramble down a steep Rocky… What do you call it when the “cliff” is more like 60°?
Rocky, but with very very few handholds, and long And tall enough that you have to be careful so you don’t slip and get yourself hurt.
Anyway, I scrambled down that. Not the first time I’ve had to do that in that spot, I don’t think 🙃, found the trail, found a safer means of getting down than the way that I had gone while looking for the trail, and then headed back.
I didn’t make it all the way back to them, because they had started coming to me, so they were already along the path that they needed to go, part of which Was pretty sketchy, with really steep, hard packed shale-filled dirt, immediately preceding a fairly large drop off.
In several places, I carved little footholds out of the shale dirt to make it safer and more stable to walk along the “path.”
In order to avoid the steeper Rocky scramble that I mistakenly had to go down, well, chose to go down, We went down a mostly dirt scramble (probably about three times as long, but definitely safer).
Then we wound around the path, around the side of the cliff that goes for several hundred feet above you, with me carving places to put your feet in the steep shale dirt, before turning the corner To go down the Super long dirt/ Rock slide.
When I went down that slide years ago as a teenager, there was so much dirt and so much Rock, that you could jump down it And slide and not risk really getting injured. You could go down crazy quickly because you just jump and plant and jump and plant and jump and plant, and every time you planted, you’d slide a few feet, but you would get used to the angle, so you wouldn’t ever fall.
But after so many years, there’s not much left in the way of soft dirt and rock that gives When you land on it.
So it became a much more technical route down than it usually is, having to be a lot more careful.
Gratefully, somebody put some ropes there. There’s not really much danger of getting injured, at least not more than scrapes and bruises, so the ropes are a welcome resource going down.
Anyway, we finally made it past the last of the technical obstacles to the main trail below upper Falls, and headed down.
It was a good choice on Jared’s part to have gone down instead of to have continued exploring. I wanted to show them the rest of my favorite places up there, but I’m also used to that terrain and that type of hiking, so my estimates for how long it would take to get down were wildly inaccurate.
But we got down safely with only a few scrapes And a little bit of blood, and many many many many rocks in the shoes. 🙃 (We stopped multiple times along the hiking/climbing trip to remove them)
Back at Jared’s place, we watched a movie… honestly can’t remember which one now, and then listened to some music.
Lovely day. 🙂
My back didn’t like some of the things I did while on the hike/climb. I’m not sure what it didn’t like. That’s one of the hard things about all of this Spine stuff. Getting out and getting moving seems to make things better, but some of the moving doesn’t, and I don’t really know what’s what.
I am learning, slowly, as I find patterns in the pain and other symptoms.
I crashed for the night once again at the Maverik in pleasant Grove, once again grateful to have that new place now that Walmarts are much less friendly (having reduced their hours of operation from 24 hours a day to closing at 11:00 p.m., and having started putting signs up for no overnight parking in many of their locations when they used to encourage and welcome overnight parking).
So, thank you, Maverik for being a new option in this most recent van life experience.
And I’m grateful that I was able to share one of my favorite places with people I care about. 🥰
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 