Dave's Story*

As someone who made soups in an upscale restaurant, Dave was used to lifting heavy pots. And he often picked up weighty items at the culinary institute where he had been a student. But one time, things went awry. “I was lifting a pot of soup and felt a burning pain,” he recalls. Then, only a few years out of high school, he couldn’t have imagined that his life would soon be dominated by chronic pain.

Dave had several surgeries to treat his injury, but his symptoms grew more intense. Burning, stabbing, and shooting pains ran through his hips and thighs, forcing him to give up a career in the cooking arts. He tried working in an office, but his sensations overwhelmed him. He could barely sleep and sometimes needed hours to get out of bed. His relationships with his family and girlfriend deteriorated.

“It’s not just your own life that’s ruined,” he says. “It’s the people around you. I just didn’t want to deal with anyone.” All his struggles made him depressed, and he wondered if he would ever enjoy the life that lay ahead. When his doctor told him that he had exhausted all his options except neurostimulation, Dave decided to give the therapy a try, even though the doctor was cautious about whether it would help.

But help it did. After getting used to the neurostimulation, Dave began to notice a change in his symptoms. His pain was around half of what it had been before, and on some days, it was less than that. This improvement allowed him to walk more, sit more comfortably, and get out of bed with less effort. Little by little, Dave began reclaiming his life. He reconnected with his family, enrolled in college, and started teaching cooking classes at a specialty food store.

“There’s no way I would have considered doing all this before,” he says. “There’s a lot of my life I’ve lost. What’s come back—that’s the greatest thing in the world.”

*The above testimonial is the experience of this individual only. It is an individual result and we do not claim that it is representative of the experience that all or most patients achieve and is not indicative of future performance or success.

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