Specialists of Mexican Social Security Institute number 21 of Nuevo León achieved successfully reconstruct the shattered spine of a patient bedridden due to spinal tuberculosis, called Mal de Pott.
The patient, named Rodolfo León Rodríguez, was bedridden for seven years and six months with intense pain, said the head of the Spine Clinical Department at UMAE No. 21, Dr. Joel León Ruiz.
In 2015, the 55-year-old patient, originally from Matamoros, Tamaulipas, presented back discomfort due to an infection that was controlled with medication. By 2019, the pain became more intense in the lower back, accompanied by electric shock sensations in the legs and muscle weakness; by then he already required crutches.
After various studies it was found that the patient had damage to 60 percent of the spine, but when everything was ready for salvage surgery, the pandemic was overcome. Finally, the intervention for Mr. Rodolfo was scheduled for March 18, 2022.
The surgery was performed by Dr. Abraham Isáis Gómez, a specialist in Traumatology and Orthopedics with a subspecialty in Spine, who was assisted by Drs. José Pablo Rodríguez López and Othoniel Cruz Jiménez.
At the beginning of the surgery, surgeons found a collapsed spine, with an amorphous mass containing destroyed bones, ligaments, nerves and muscles out of place.
“The problem was that it was as if a bomb had exploded and you have all the pieces everywhere,” explained Isáis Gómez.
The first challenge was boarding. The anatomical deformation prevented surgeons from reaching the spine in the usual way. With difficulty they assessed the damage, discovered the area and determined exactly where they would place the screws and bone grafts taken from the patient’s spine.
The three surgeons worked in a synchronized manner for eight hours in a meticulous orthopedic technique that consists of making small squares of bone, called “chips”, to shape them and rebuild the spine, until it was ready.
Once the new structure was placed in the destroyed area, together with the eight screws, two bars and a crossbar, they proceeded with the complicated decompression, in which they had to carefully remove pieces of bone, ligaments and fibrosis that were compressing and They damaged the nerves. In addition, they removed the scars left by tuberculosis.
At the end of the surgery, the doctors were surprised by the recovery of the patient, who left the hospital four days later to return home.
“I came out so well that I didn’t know if they had done surgery, because I didn’t feel any pain, nothing, I even told my wife: ‘check my back,'” shared the patient.
Don Rodolfo remembers that every two months he traveled from Matamoros to Monterrey for his tuberculosis treatment. Initially, he arrived at the hospital on crutches, later in a wheelchair and finally on a stretcher. “I tried to get up, but I couldn’t anymore, it took an hour and a half,” he recalled.
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