I’m sitting around here this morning thinking about my poor hurting neck and shoulder. In fact it’s hard to do much else. This situation has my attention. I’ve spent the last three plus months with not much else on my mind except this. Don’t get me wrong, if I take enough drugs into my body, it leaves me along for a few hours, but the nagging always returns. I went in on Friday and got the third shot, one a month for three months and it is more painful now than it’s been being.

Stored in my phone are photographs of X-rays that I snapped one day in the doctors office. I can’t even tell you when that was. It may have been a few months ago or a few years ago. Time is kind of a fog at this point. But I know it’s my own neck, that I’m sure of.

Back in 2005 when I was about to go crazy, this spine surgeon went in a put a metal plate, that extends across three discs and attached them with screws. Those show up in the photo below.

That fix took care of everything for 5 years but the stresses from the vertebrae being fused above caused the next disc to go. I was told at the time of the first fusing, that would possibly happen. Another trip to surgery in 2010 got my wire up job done. I call it that because it looks like a piece of baling wire went down around a piece of bone that sticks out and a with a twist up at the top, somehow fastened it around the plate or screw. That shows up in the same photo up above.

I took another photo, a side view, in which I could see the actual threads on the screws where they are tapped into the bone. I know this my seem a little gruesome to some of you, but Halloween is coming up and you see all kinds of skeleton pictures.

But what freaks me out about the side view photograph, it appears that the wire is hanging out in air, or in this case meaty flesh, because there is no bone showing up, nor is it attached to the metal pieces, as you can see in the photo below.

Like I said in the beginning I’m no doctor, but seriously this looks and feels like I got a piece of wire jabbing me in the neck. Isn’t that a piece of wire floating around with a sharp barb on the end? It sure feels like it.

The good thing is I have an appointment on November 12 with that same surgeon that put that plate, screws and wire in there. If he sees what I’m seeing I sure hope he isn’t in denial or he can explain to me what in the hell I’m seeing.

Thanks to all reading this for being my therapist. Sometimes it’s just good to talk about these things. And perhaps someone practice with looking at X-rays can tell me why that looks the way it does.