Now, about those comments y’all have posted, but never seen on the site. Umm, well….
They’re all there now and I am ducking shame-faced from the room.
My apologies! Thanks to Tami writing me with a heads-up about her comments not showing up here, I looked at my comments in MT tonight. Mandi recently upgraded our blogs to MovableType 3.2. With it, she installed some spam comment filters. I am still getting the hang of these filters, such as what values to assign to certain criteria. My criteria has been, well, a tad too tight!
Your comments are now up on the entries where you posted them. First, thank you for your encouraging words and prayers this last month! I didn’t see the comments until today, but the prayers were very much heard! As for the questions posted, let’s see if I can remember who wanted to know what…
Stacey wanted to know what was wrong with Howie. In a nutshell, he broke his back in 1994 and reinjured it upon going back to his job. As a result of that, he had a fusion done on L3-L4 in 1996. He also had pre-existing scoliosis and, over the next several years, his curvatures worsened. The last ten years saw him stoop more each year as the kyphosis (think humpback) worsened. What he had done at Johns Hopkins was a complete realignment and rebuild of the vertebrae from T9 down to his sacrum (tailbone). He has all kinds of titanium screws and plates holding everything together while the bones fuse together. The hardware stays, though once the bones fuse there isn’t a need for it. For the first time in 12 years, he can walk without pain. You can read more about it at his blog.
I’m glad you got them fixed