Driving his delivery route day after day, six days a week, month after month between Tacoma and Portland took its toll on Braun Hudson’s lower back.
The constant jarring, shifting gears, depressing the clutch, the up-and-down of getting in and out of the truck…it all came together in a perfect spinal storm that forced him to sit down in 2015.
He woke up one in the middle of the night unable to move his legs.
His local hospital got him stabilized, but the follow-up required a lot of medications to control the pain – something for which Braun said he just wasn’t comfortable. And the doctors at the hospital were recommending open back surgery, which also rang alarm bells in his head, Braun said.
So he started looking for long-term solutions. An Internet search turned up several possibilities, but the process took time – and exacted more tolls.
“There were multiple times where I couldn’t move at all,” he said. “I’d find myself on the floor, in tears, unable to move, for it seemed like hours.”
His family felt the pain too. Many times he could not go to his kids’ games and school activities, could not take walks with his wife, could not do his chores around the house and yard.
Then, on the Internet, he found Dr. Solomon Kamson and the Spine Institute Northwest in Bothell, Washington.
“I liked him right from the beginning,” he said.
Dr. Kamson looked at Braun’s MRIs, taken by a previous doctor. Braun said Dr. Kamson told him he didn’t know how he was still walking, and scheduled a minimally-invasive lumbar decompression surgery right away to relieve pressure on the nerves in his lower back.
Laughing now, happy to get back to his family, his job, his life, Braun said choosing Dr. Kamson and the Spine Institute Northwest was one of the best decisions of his life.
“I have absolutely no pain at all,” he said. “It’s a thousand times better than it was.”
He’s teaching his son to drive, got the yard cleaned up, and he’s back on the road earning a living and a life for his family.
“Give these guys a shot,” he recommends. “They know what they’re doing and they do it well.”
Watch Braun’s testimonial in the video below: