A little over a year ago I hurt my back pretty badly and ended up having a surgery to try and fix it. I documented the process on my old blog over at Transworld BMX. A  number of people have been asking me lately how things are going so it seemed like an update was due.  I also posted a little re-cap of some of the old posts below for those who are interested. Well, it’s been over a year since I’ve been able to ride. I guess I’ve been putting off this post-surgery update hoping I would have something very positive to post. Hopefully something about how I was all better and back to riding. The reality though is that getting back on my bike is going very slowly. I’m still keeping up with all my physical therapy and rehab and for the most part I’m functioning like normal. I can sit again, don’t have any weight restrictions on what I lift and can ride around on a bike no problem. I still can’t “really” ride though. If I so much as hop up a curb shooting pain hits me right in the surgery area. Its pretty frustrating and been this way for about the last 5 months. I get the same pain if I pump a ramp at all as well. The result is that I can roll around, but really can’t get off the ground without my eyes watering from the pain. I saw the doctor again a couple weeks ago and he now wants me to wait another 5 months before he possibly performs another surgery that would take me out for an additional 6 months! Not really sure how that will work out. In the meantime I have been making an effort to push myself harder in the gym and that seems to be helping a tiny bit. I went and rode the new Empire ramp the other day and I actually got about 15 minutes of below coping riding in before I got too sore. All I can really do is to keep working on getting stronger and more flexible to compensate for the fused together disc. One of the possible causes of this is that the discs above the surgery were also damaged. Not nearly as severely as the one that was removed, but still significant enough to be causing some of this pain. Especially now that they are forced to move even more to compensate for the fused one that can not move at all.  I guess its not abnormal for recovery to take several years too, but hopefully it won’t take that long for me. I have been riding around more and more. I can really feel the difference in my back… its even changed my riding position ever so slightly. I’m sure part of it is that I am protecting the painful area, but also because I simply can not bend my back the same was as before. Here’s the […]

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