Loretta Collins

My legs went dead in my own driveway. Here's what no doctor ever told me.

Ad Copy

I made it halfway down my own driveway before my legs went dead under me. I grabbed the mailbox with both hands and waved at Ada across the street, smiling, so she wouldn't come see the state I was in. Years of spinal stenosis, and no one ever explained the one thing I figured out gripping that mailbox: my legs died when I stood tall, and came back the second I leaned forward on it. My name is Loretta. I'm seventy-one, and I taught fourth grade in Marion for forty-three years before I retired. My husband Roy built me a raised garden bed the summer I turned sixty. Tomatoes, mostly, with marigolds along the edge to keep the bugs off. For two years I couldn't stand at it long enough to pull a single weed. Two summers, gone. I will never get them back, and I am still angry about it, so let me save you yours. Your stenosis is the canal in your spine closing in on the nerve. Every doctor told me that much. Not one of them told me why it was closing. And once you know, you’re going to be as angry as I am. It isn't your age. It isn't your weight. It isn't the walking. It's the discs. The discs between the bones of your spine are cushions full of water. When you're young they sit tall and hold the bones apart, and the nerve has a clean tunnel to pass through. After fifty, those discs dry out and go flat. And when a disc goes flat, the bones above and below it settle down closer together, and that settling is what crushes the tunnel shut on the nerve. The narrowing they keep pointing at on the scan isn't the cause. It's the result. The flat disc one level up is the cause. Your nerve is just where the damage lands. And here is how I know it's the disc and not the bone. It's a thing you can feel in your own body right now. Why can you lean on a grocery cart and push it around the store for an hour, but you can't stand at your own counter for five minutes? Why does bending over the sink feel good? Because leaning forward pulls those settled bones apart a hair and opens the tunnel back up, for about a minute. Every time you grab that cart, you are decompressing your own spine. You just can't hold the position. Doctors even have a name for it. They call it the shopping cart sign. It has a name, it sits on every scan, and for years not one person in a white coat ever explained it to me. That is the part that still makes me sick. Because once you see it, every treatment they sold me makes a terrible, infuriating kind of sense. The shots numb the crushed nerve for a few weeks. They don't put one millimeter of height back in the disc. I paid fifteen hundred dollars a time to buy myself six more weeks of pretending, and I went back and did it again, and again, and the only thing that ever really changed was the balance in my checking account. The physical therapy strengthens the muscles around a collapsed disc. It doesn't re-inflate the disc. Even the laminectomy they kept dangling only shaves the bone to make a little room. It never restores the disc. So the stack keeps settling, the tunnel closes back in, and the symptoms come home. Every last one of them worked below the thing doing the damage. Not one of them was ever going to fix it. The whole system is built to manage you, appointment after appointment, never to end it. I did all of it. The heating pad and the twenty-dollar massager, nice for an hour and useless after. The chiropractor, sixty dollars a visit, twice a week. A full year of physical therapy that helped, then just stopped. A clinic two towns over wanted six thousand dollars for a course of decompression, and Medicare wouldn't touch a dime of it. Somewhere in those years I stopped being able to stand for my own grandson. Last spring Wyatt hit his first real home run and looked up into the bleachers to find me, and I was the only grandparent still sitting down. On the drive home he asked me, plain as day, "Grandma, how come you never stand up at my games?" He's seven. He just wanted to know. I told him my legs were tired, and I looked out the window so he wouldn't see my face. The day I finally called the surgeon, I went down on the cold floor of the grocery store, right there by the dairy case. A boy stocking shelves crouched down and asked if he should call somebody. I smiled up at him so he wouldn't worry, and I have never felt so old in all my life. And I need to tell you about Doreen, because she is the reason I stopped waiting, and because I’m scared to death you are her. Doreen sat two pews ahead of me at First Lutheran for eleven years. Same diagnosis I had. Same shopping cart sign nobody ever bothered to explain to her either. She was the one who ran the funeral luncheons and never once let a new widow eat alone. She did everything they told her. Three years of it. The therapy, the shots, the waiting the surgeon kept calling for. Her scans got worse anyway. So they did the laminectomy. She got fourteen good weeks. Then the heavy legs came back worse than before the knife, because cutting the bone never touched the flat disc that started the whole thing. By that fall she needed a walker to cross her own kitchen. By Christmas she couldn't manage even that. Her family set up a bed for her in the front room so she'd stop trying the stairs. Her granddaughter asked at the dinner table, right out loud, why Grandma Doreen doesn't come to church anymore, and Doreen's daughter had to get up and leave the room. Doreen did every single thing her doctors told her. She was a good patient. And she is the part they never say out loud. Because stenosis is progressive. It moves in one direction. Every month that disc stays flat, the tunnel closes a little more, and a nerve that stays crushed long enough stops being about pain and starts being about whether your legs hold you up at all. Nobody ever handed Doreen the one thing that might have changed her ending. I can't forgive that. And I will not sit quiet and let it be yours. That is when Bernadette started in on me. She'd been a physical therapist here in Marion her whole working life. And she told me the truth her whole profession is built not to say. "Loretta, I made a good living off women like you, and I'm not proud of what I'm about to tell you. Everything I ever did for your back worked on the muscle. The stretches, the hands-on, the exercises. Not one thing I billed you for ever put a single millimeter back into a flat disc. And a flat disc is the whole problem. I knew it. Most of us knew it. But there's no billing code for restoring a disc, so we kept charging you to strengthen the muscle. A flat disc only comes back if three things happen at once. You decompress the spine, so it finally has room to pull water back in. You warm it deep at the same time, so the water actually moves. And you release the muscles clamping it down, so the space holds instead of locking back down the second you're on your feet. Do one without the others and you've wasted your money." Then she told me a small company had built a device that does all three at once, at home, for fifteen minutes a day. Gentle traction that decompresses the spine a few millimeters and opens the canal. Deep heat that draws the water back into the flat disc. A targeted massage that resets the muscles so the decompression actually stays put. It's called the SmoothSpine Triple Fusion Massager. I looked it up the way a burned, skeptical old woman looks things up. Over twenty-one thousand people using it. A refund rate under half a percent. A ninety-day money-back guarantee, so the only thing you're risking is staying exactly where you are. I added up what those years of treatments cost me once. More than twenty thousand dollars, and not one dollar of it ever went at the flat disc that was causing all of it. They had it 60% off the week I ordered, and it goes straight at the disc. Less than one of the cortisone shots that stopped working on me. Less than two visits to the chiropractor. Less than the co-pay Doreen handed over for the surgery that gave her fourteen weeks. I ordered it that night. The first three days I felt nothing. I almost told Bernadette she'd been wrong. Day four I stood at the sink and finished every last dish without leaning on the counter once. I didn't even notice until I was drying my hands. Week two I stood for the whole hymn in church. Roy noticed before I said a word, then looked back down at his hymnal real fast. Week five I walked the entire store, both laps, and only touched the cart to put groceries in it. When I got to the car I stood in the parking lot for a full minute, just feeling my own two legs hold me up, steady, the way they used to. And a little after that I was back at my garden bed with a fistful of weeds, standing up straight, when Roy came around the corner of the house and just stopped. He's not a talker. He got the hose and started watering next to me like we'd been doing it that way all along. And two Saturdays ago, Wyatt hit another home run. This time I was on my feet before the ball cleared the fence. He found me in the bleachers and pointed right at me, and I pointed right back. That was the whole reason I did any of this. I'm not going to tell you I'm cured. Everyone's spine is different, and I can only tell you my own story. But I can stand. I can walk my own store. And I have not sat down for one of Wyatt's games since. Here is what I can't get out of my head. A flat disc only comes back when three things happen at once. Doreen's shots did one of them. Her surgery did one of them. Nobody ever gave her all three working together, and that is the only reason her story ends where it does and mine doesn't. You've got two doors a doctor will point you toward. The shots you go back for forever, or the knife Doreen is still paying for. There's a third one they don't have a code for, which is exactly why nobody in that office will ever mention it. And if you want to know whether this is you, don't take my word for a thing. Next time your legs quit, watch what your hands reach for. If it's a cart to lean on, that's the shopping cart sign, and your own body just told you what's wrong and exactly what it needs. I've left an article below that explains the real reason your legs quit, why the shots and the surgery never touched it, and exactly how the three-part fix works, better than I ever could. Read it. If it makes sense, try it. If nothing changes in ninety days, you send it back and you're out nothing. But don't wait for your next appointment to decide. Doreen waited. She did every single thing they told her, and by that last Christmas she couldn't cross her own kitchen even with the walker. Nobody put this in her hands in time, and I would give anything to have changed that. https://try.smoothspine.com/tfbm-coc-adv2-ss P.S. You'll feel the first sign before any doctor could measure it. For me it wasn't a number on a chart, it was standing at the sink long enough to finish the dishes. Mark the day it happens for you. You'll want to remember it. P.P.S. Ninety-day money-back guarantee. Ninety days, not thirty. A small company only offers ninety when they already know what happens inside ninety. The cortisone shots never came with a guarantee. Neither did Doreen's surgery. If nothing changes, you send it back and you're out nothing. P.P.P.S. SmoothSpine is a small operation and they make these in batches that sell out. If your next appointment is thirty to ninety days off, don't wait for it. Order the thing that might change your ending while it's still in stock, not next week. Doreen would give anything to have started this three years ago. Here’s the link again: https://try.smoothspine.com/tfbm-coc-adv2-ss