I work as a school counselor at a junior high school. I love it. I love my job, I love working with kids this age. A school counselor is mainly there for the students to help them figure out what they’re doing in their future, help them to figure out what they want to do and the best way to get there.
When I’m not at work, I have four children. They keep me busy. We have a lot of activities, a lot of my time is spent chauffeuring kids from one activity to another – practices and games and things like that. We like to spend time together as a family, we love going on vacations together, we love playing games. One of the best times of the day is when we sit down and have dinner. I like to do summer activities like camping and hiking. I like to ride my bike. I like to read a lot, because it’s my downtime and it’s relaxing.
The end of May is when I first noticed I was having some pain in my right shoulder and neck. I thought it was just stiff muscles, and it didn’t really go away. Then it started slowly traveling down my arm, and my arm would go numb. I didn’t know what was going on. My brother, I was talking with him and he had just had a disc fusion on his neck. He said, “That sounds like the symptoms that I was having.”
It got to the point where my arm was numb probably 90 percent of the time. Laying in bed, I couldn’t sleep at night. Driving was a problem; I couldn’t turn around to check a blind spot. Even holding a book up to read was too much, so I stopped reading. It was interfering with a lot of things in my life.
I went to an orthopedic doctor and he said, “We probably should order an MRI.” I had a herniated disc, but I didn’t want to have the fusion because I saw the recovery that my brother was going through. With the fusion, he was in the hard neck brace for six weeks and it was more intensive recovery for him.
When Dr. Khachatryan described the disc replacement surgery, he mentioned the Mobi-C. He gave me the website to look at and research. I was able to read about different patients’ experiences with it, so it put my mind at ease.
I noticed an immediate difference in the way my arm felt, and the pain, the numbness was gone. Dr. K approved me to go back to work in a week after being out. That was just amazing. I could do everything that I needed to do. The third day back, I actually had to work a longer day because we had parent-teacher conferences. I was doing great, and it had been a week and a half since I had surgery. I’m four months out from my surgery, and I forget that I’ve had the surgery. That’s how great I feel. I’m back to doing everything I was doing before.
If there are people out there who are having the difficulty, and having the pain and the numbness, don’t be discouraged. There is hope. I am a huge fan. I would highly recommend disc replacement surgery. I love this, I’m so glad I did it. My name is Karen, I had my Mobi-C surgery in September of 2013. This is my Mobi-C.