Back in action

BY JIM HOWE

Anyone can hurt their back by lifting something heavy. The resulting pain may come from a herniated disk, also called a slipped or ruptured disk. Some people whose injury does not heal become candidates for a surgery done through a tiny incision, with a quick recovery.

Over the summer, Upstate neurosurgeon Ali Hazama, MD, operated on Julia Blair, 22, now a senior at SUNY Potsdam. Blair was amazed to be so quickly relieved of pain she had since fall 2021.

Blair plays on the college’s women’s varsity lacrosse team. She injured her back while deadlifting during a workout in November 2021. “I must have had the wrong form, or maybe too much weight,” she recalls. “I felt like I pulled something in my back, and a day later, I had shooting pains down my left leg,”

She waited. The pain did not go away. She saw a chiropractor, who had her do some exercises.

The pain persisted as the 2021 autumn training season gave way to the spring 2022 lacrosse season. Blair only played in a handful of her team’s 16 games. She saw a doctor who ordered an MRI scan of her back and referred her to Hazama for possible surgery.

Since Blair’s pain did not subside on its own, Hazama recommended a procedure called endoscopic lumbar diskectomy (see box). He showed Blair images of the spinal endoscopic tool he would use to remove the disk fragments that were pressing against a nerve and causing her pain.

The tool allows surgery with a tiny incision instead of a traditional, or open, surgery, which would require a much larger incision, then further cutting through large amounts of tissue to get to the problem area, with a lengthier and likely more painful recovery period.

“Endoscopic spine surgery is an ultraminimally invasive technique that really is built around preserving normal body tissue and directly treating the problem without introducing any further damage to the body or the spine,“ Hazama explains.

“You save the patient the surgical pain, the pain that comes not just from the problem that someone comes in with, but from the actual cutting of normal tissue, that lasts for days to weeks after a traditional surgery,” Hazama says. “That’s why these patients are usually extremely happy with the results of the surgeries.”

Hazama notes that this procedure cannot be used for all spinal problems. But in addition to herniated disks, it can relieve the pressure of spinal stenosis and be used to perform corrective procedures, such as spinal fusions, as well as spinal biopsies.

The thought of surgery scared Blair at first. “I was so nervous, and it ended up being like a piece of cake, and the doctor and all his staff there were incredible. They made me feel so good about having this done,” she says.

The surgery, which took place in May at Upstate, lasted less than an hour, and she went home within a few hours, which is typical for this procedure. She recalls feeling no pain on the three-hour car ride back to her home in Massena, including a stop for dinner. problems will have their problem resolved without undergoing surgery, a statistic he shares with pride.

“I was, like, instantly relieved,” she recalls. As she got up from the table after eating and walked to the car, she was thrilled to realize: “I don’t feel any pain.” Friends and family who had watched her struggle to put on her own socks saw a huge difference.

But for those whose spinal problem doesn’t resolve by itself, endoscopic spinal surgery offers a route to getting back to one’s normal routine. This surgery has been around for years, but recent advances

This is a minimally invasive operation , a device with a pencil-sized tube, which a surgeon uses to insert tiny tools for cutting, removing and cauterizing tissue. A tiny camera and lights transmit highquality images of the affected area to a refers to the lower back.

is the removal of the damaged portion of a herniated disk. Disks are the rubbery cushions between the vertebrae, or stack of bones making up the spinal column, which surrounds and protects the nerve tissue of the spinal cord. When the outer wall of a disk dries out or weakens with age or injury, the soft, inner part bulges out, resulting in a herniated disk. This can press on nerve tissue and cause pain,