Rita's Story*

Not long ago, Rita was sitting with her husband when he mentioned her spinal cord stimulator. “He said he couldn’t believe the difference it’s made,” recalls Rita. She feels the same way. In fact, it’s hard for her to imagine living without her device.

When pain entered her life, Rita was a hair stylist in a small Texas town who loved her job and never thought she would have to leave it behind. But one day, while giving a customer a trim, she felt excruciating pain in her back and legs. She excused herself, went to the back of the shop, and sat down. The customer waited as Rita tried to recover and then finish the job.

Doctors later told Rita that her pain was caused by nerve damage, and they gave her medication and injections to ease her symptoms. Yet the treatments never really took care of the pain. For Rita, walking became an ordeal, and standing—an obvious requirement for her profession—became a punishing experience. In time, she cut back on her hours at work and then quit because she could no longer spend extended periods on her feet.

After a pain specialist told Rita about neurostimulation, she was nervous about trying the therapy but figured she had little to lose. She used a test stimulator for a few days to see if it would have any effect on her pain. It did. And despite her earlier fears, she quickly decided to have a neurostimulator implanted. “I had no qualms about it,” she says.

Since then, Rita has been able to do lots of things that were out of reach when she was in pain. She walks more, cooks, cleans her house, and even makes “pear honey” a special jelly that she has been canning since she was a little girl. Although she still takes pain medication, her device has done a lot to improve her life. “I’m far better than I was,” she says. “My stimulator has made a world of difference.”

*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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