Leah will get an early present this year. She’s going to have surgery on the Monday before Christmas.

She has been having leg pain for several months because of pressure on a nerve in her spine, and she is experiencing some weakness in her leg. She has fallen a few times lately, once in the shower and once in the garage. She has avoided serious injury only through luck. It has reached the point that surgery of some sort is necessary.

The surgeon gave her two choices, fusion of the L4 and L5 vertebrae, or a laminectomy, in which the doctor removes some of the tissue that is pressing on the nerve. As usual, the choice was not clear. The laminectomy would almost certainly eliminate the problem, but it’s possible that the vertebrae might have too much motion as a result, and a fusion would have to be performed anyway. Fusion seemed a surer bet, but fusing vertebrae results in reduced motion, which often leads to back problems in other locations.

The laminectomy is a less complicated surgery that requires less time to recover — weeks instead of months. We asked the doctor the probability of needing fusion after a laminectomy. He said maybe 10 to 15 percent. Then we asked which he would do if he were in Leah’s shoes. He said a laminectomy. So that’s what Leah is going to get.

The surgery will be first thing Monday morning. And I mean first thing. We have to be at the hospital at 5:30 that morning. That’s bad enough, but Leah is supposed to drink a special carbohydrate supplement two hours before she arrives, plus take a shower with an antibiotic soap. And it takes about a half an hour to get to the hospital from our house. So we’ll be up shortly after we go to bed.

Leah is not looking forward to the surgery. She’s worried about a lot of things, some of which are even possible. Her father had surgery at about 81, and suffered permanent cognitive decline as a result of anesthesia (Post Operative Cognitive Dysfunction. Here’s the wikipedia article; if you search for POCD you will find lots of other articles, some pretty scary. See in particular the first sentence of the abstract at that link.). He also had back surgery many years ago, and that surgery left him with a weak leg.

And then there’s the fact that when we asked the doctor which surgery he would do, he said he would really not like to have any surgery. But, as I said, there really is no choice at this point.