Troy's Story*

As “Cowboy Gus,” a character he played for his local chamber of commerce, Troy spent hours greeting tourists. Wearing boots, overalls, and a foam rubber head, he appeared in parades and rodeos and had his photo taken with dozens of children. Unfortunately, these fun times were not without their cost. “I noticed that every time I did it,” he says, “my back would hurt a little bit.”

Troy was later diagnosed with a spine condition that required surgery to correct. But after going through with the procedure, his pain got worse instead of better and spread to his hips and leg. “The pain was a monster,” he says. “I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t work. I couldn’t stand or do anything very long. I started getting desperate.”

Even when he tried getting out of the house to escape his pain-centered life, Troy really couldn’t enjoy himself. “I would fall asleep in movies just because of the medication I had to take to get there,” he recalls. “I was drugged up all the time. My social life went down to about 2 percent of what it was.”

The change came for Troy when he signed up for a trial period of neurostimulation. “I got to sleep through the whole night and stand for more than an hour,” he remembers. “You talk about excited.” Afterward, he had a permanent stimulator implanted and was happy to discover that most of his pain was brought under control.

“It’s almost unbelievable,” he says when summing up his stimulation. “If I didn’t experience it, I wouldn’t believe it could do what it did. Boy, I wish I’d known about this a lot sooner.”


*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.

	**
**This website may provide links to other websites not affiliated with SJM.  SJM is not responsible for the content of other sites.