Steve's Story*

One sunny afternoon, Steve was trimming the grass at his 11-acre home in central Texas. His wife was driving a lawn tractor nearby and noticed when he dropped from view. She rushed to the place where he had been working and found him on his knees and in terrible pain. “There’s something going on in my lower back that’s about to kill me,” he told her.

Doctors later found that Steve’s back had been fractured in two places and performed surgery to repair the damage. Unfortunately, a byproduct of the surgery was chronic pain that could not be easily remedied. After failed attempts to treat the pain with medications and injections, Steve’s doctor proposed trying a therapy that Steve had never heard of before—neurostimulation.

While considering his doctor’s advice, Steve saw a video on neurostimulation and visited the internet to learn more about the therapy. He decided to undergo a procedure that would let him try the therapy before committing to a fully implanted device. Although not all his pain was relieved during this temporary evaluation period, he could tell that the therapy was helping, so he decided to have a stimulator implanted. It proved a wise choice. “With the stimulator,” he now says, “the pain is almost totally removed.”

Steve’s pain no longer keeps him from seeing friends, sitting at the movies, or taking his wife dancing, things that he struggled to do when dealing with pain. “We didn’t go places, really, at all,” he remembers. “I couldn’t keep up the pace. It was a very depressing thing not to be able to socialize because of pain.”

In the years since getting a neurostimulator, Steve has become an advocate for the therapy, sometimes volunteering to talk to others about his device. Having spent years as a teacher and vocational rehabilitation counselor, his messages focus on the value of education. “I would strongly urge people to check into this and find someone who is knowledgeable about stimulation—another patient would be best. It [having a stimulator] has been a life-changing experience.”

*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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