After an accident on the job, Glenn Steig thought he’d just pulled a muscle. But when he went to work the next day, the delivery driver soon found himself unable to drive, and then to walk — his leg kept going numb. Sciatic nerve pain made his legs feel ” like I had Charlie horses in them, in the calves, all the time,” Glenn recalls.
He put up with the pain for several years. Multiple physicians had told him that surgery was “not an option, it was a necessity,” but Glenn hesitated. Finally, “it was to the point I couldn’t do hardly anything anymore, and I thought ‘This is insane, I’m not going to go through my retirement like that,'” he remembers. “It was time to get it fixed.”
Glenn took the time to research and to explore his different options. “It’s quite a bit of research checking different options on what you could do and what I couldn’t do, what seemed to have the better results,” he says. “What was less invasive, that was the big thing.” After all, Glenn had already lived with his pain for years — he didn’t want to spend a week laid up in the hospital.
When Glenn found Dr. Solomon Kamson and the Spine Institute Northwest, he felt he’d made the right choice. “When I first met [Dr. Kamson] he was very open, he seemed knowledgeable, he seemed friendly, he seemed to really care,” Glenn remembers.
Glenn wound up having a disc repaired and a disc replaced, relieving the pressure on his sciatic nerve. Though he still has minor pain in one foot, “I’ve got no pain my legs. It’s a world of difference there.” Now 60 years old, Glenn can look forward to enjoying a healthy retirement, free from his intense sciatic pain.
Hear Glenn’s advice for people suffering from chronic pain: