– Life before surgery
entailed pain that increased with time. Everything I tried
only worked for a little and then pain would come back
and would come back even more. I'm big into the outdoors. I like to hike.
I like to mountaineer. I like to rock climb.
I like to bicycle, kayak. Anything that has adventure,
I'm in for it. But as time moved on, the pain kept coming back
sooner and sooner.
I couldn't do my hiking anymore. I couldn't do my kayaking anymore. Life was not worth it if I couldn't do
the things I loved. So surgery for me
was no-brainer. So I decided to look
for a good neurosurgeon and my cousin suggested
Dr. Dante from Virtua. Immediately after I met him, I knew he was
the surgeon for me. – Mike was a very active person. He was doing
a lot of athletic activity and had some wear and tear
on his back and joints, and he was just being
more and more disabled by chronic pain. The problem for Mike
is trying to identify where the pain was coming from. He had been through
various evaluations trying to decide
was it a hip problem or a knee problem
and then we finally determined that he was having
some spinal stenosis that was causing
nerve compression. He needed surgery that had
some complexity to it. We talked about the fact that
we could provide the surgery with a team of people
at Memorial Hospital at Virtua who were really experienced
with spinal operations, even these complex surgeries.
– It worked out perfectly for me because I was able to
have my surgery done in south Jersey
in a local hospital, a great hospital,
Virtua Memorial. I had my Penn doctor. I couldn't ask
for anything more. – I think Mike is an example
of how well we can provide surgery in New Jersey
through the Virtua system and get patients back
where they want to be in terms of a very active, functional lifestyle. – Everything went beautiful. Beautiful to the point
that six months, exactly six months
from the day he did surgery, I was skiing
black diamond bump runs out in British Columbia. [birds chirping].