A fall can injure your spine and cause you discomfort sooner or later. This is precisely what happened to Josefita Noemí Mazariegos de Corzo, a 73-year-old patient from Guatemala who came to Instituto Clavel after suffering a fall, in the hope of improving her condition and regaining her ability to move freely. Read her story below.
The back is often the most seriously injured part of the body when a person falls. The impact of the blow to the back will depend on the person’s body weight. Josefita Noemí Mazariegos de Corzo knows first-hand the problems a fall can cause and how much it can seriously limit your ability to carry out normal daily activities.
As she herself says, "Only a person who has lived through this can understand what another person feels in the same situation." After the accident, Noemí struggled with back pain for 20 years, however it wasn’t until a couple of years ago when the pain reached the point that it really limited her activities and it felt like her legs wouldn’t obey her.
Little by little, she saw that her ability to carry out normal daily tasks was becoming more and more limited, and that’s when she decided to seek help. Noemí consulted several neurosurgeons in Guatemala, who treated her case with pain medication and movement therapies, but still, her situation did not improve. Determined to find a solution to the pain and to recover her mobility, she kept looking for an answer until she discovered that there was a center specialized in the spine in Spain.
The first contact that Noemí had with the neurosurgeon and director of Instituto Clavel, Dr. Clavel, was through a videoconference. During the videoconference, after reviewing her studies and x-rays, Dr. Clavel indicated that what she needed was to have surgery to release the compression on the spinal canal. So when Noemí arrived in Spain, she underwent a bilateral microsurgical lumbar hemilaminectomy for her lumbar stenosis.
The doctor recommended that another surgery, known as transpedicular arthrodesis, should be done along with the first surgery in order to provide stability to the spine. However, Noemí decided to postpone the arthrodesis, until after experiencing increased pain, two years after the first surgery, she returned to be operated on for the second time.
"I didn’t expect to see the doctor ever again after the second surgery. He told me ‘Your spine is perfect and now you should enjoy a better quality of life,’" Noemí says, while explaining that yet another fall landed her back in the operating room for a third time, years after her second surgery.
For this third intervention, after reviewing her tests, the doctor said that it was necessary to perform an extension of the arthrodesis up to the L1 level and decompression at the L2-L3 level. This procedure was performed on February 15, 2022.
We invite you to listen to Noemí’s story in the following video, in which you can learn about what it was like for this 73-year-old patient to go through these three spinal procedures, as well as how they improved her life.
Categories: Spine treatments, Spine pathologies, Testimonials