Chris Catron began experiencing back pain decades ago. He explains, “I was doing intensive labor jobs, and I was young, and had a new family. Instead of stopping and getting my back fixed, or letting it heal, I continued to work.” Chris kept going, but his back didn’t — soon his pain was keeping him from activities he used to enjoy, and eating away at his quality of life.
At first, Chris tried local doctors, who recommended medicinal treatments and physical therapy. Eventually, he says, “I felt like I was being trapped inside that circle of physicians, plus the technology and the expertise wasn’t there.” Chris finally found that he had reached his breaking point — his pain was so intense, he hadn’t even been able to sleep in his own bed for two years.
Chris reached out to the Spine Institute Northwest for a review of his existing records. “Dr. Kamson had looked at my x-rays and MRIs, and then he called me personally and said, ‘Hey, this is your problem…. Your vertebrae is on vertebrae, there’s no tissue in between,'” Chris remembers. “I’ve never had that, that explanation before. I’ve never had any doctor tell me why I was hurting. All [my previous doctors] said was, ‘Take these pills, and we hope these shots work.'”
With Dr. Kamson and the Spine Institute Northwest, Chris had finally found the expertise and technology that he’d been looking for. Instead of dealing with a traditional open-back surgery, with minimally invasive spine surgery Chris was able to have just a small incision. “It’s hard to believe, looking at my X-rays, that there’s that much hardware in my back with just those little slits that they cut,” he says.
Now, Chris says he’s feeling better every day, and his pain has been reduced well below the levels he had anticipated. “Every day now, I’m doing something new, that I used to do,” he says. Chris encourages others suffering from chronic back pain to reach out to the Spine Institute Northwest for a free evaluation. “I suffered 20 years,” he says, “and I would hate for somebody to suffer like that.”
Hear Chris’ story, in his own words: