Cauda Equina Syndrome and Medical Negligence

Welcome katydid!

I'm glad the hospitals here didn't really neglect you like our members. I know for regular spinal cord injuries it's recommended as soon as possible but I'm not sure what the time frame is for degenerative disc diseases. To be honest I think 2 days is pretty quick compared to what some of our other CES experienced. Whether or not the 2 day wait made a difference, I don't know, but it couldn't be so!

katydid, if you're continuing to lose function even after the operation something's not right. Where have you been losing function? Have you notified your surgeon about it?

katydid...my understanding of CES and timing of surgery is that for the best potential of less damage and more recovery is within 48 hours.

This is the recommendation although sometimes it can go a little beyond that time. I was diagnosed 3 weeks after visiting my doctors with the typical red flag signals (which they ignored).
I was then operated on as an emergency on the day i was diagnosed but damage was done then.

As DJ mentioned, if you are experienced worsening symptoms you should discuss this with your consultant just in case another disc is causing a problem.

I'm glad to hear that it's not worsening katydid

Yeah the nerve pain is frustrating, I feel like it's getting worse for me each day

I live in Texas and in Texas, the law favors doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies over patients.  I contacted a few different attorneys and was told the same thing -- and that was that even though I had a good case, it wouldn't be worth it to take the doctor and hospital to court.  In truth, attorney's are not going to take a case unless a person is young (I was 61) and will have to have expensive continuing treatment for many, many years.  Texas caps "pain and suffering" payments to $250,000 and if the economic damages are not great, it's just not worth it for attorney's since they will have to spend a lot of money on preparing for the case to go to court - including the cost of medical experts to review the case and then to testify.  Plus -- in Texas, you only have 2 years after discovering your medical injury to take the surgeon/hospital to court.  The day after I was discharged from the hospital after having L5S1 TLIF (fusion) surgery, I diagnosed myself as having Cauda Equina Syndrome.  I had two clear symptoms that the hospital nurses, the surgeon's physician's assistants and hospital "hospitalists" either ignored or were clueless about -- I was incontinent (I pee-ed all over myself as I was dressing after being cleared for discharge from the hospital) and the morning following discharge, I realized that I was numb between my legs.  After getting back into bed, I "Googled" my symptoms and CES popped up.  I immediately called my surgeon's office and was told that I couldn't have CES because I wasn't in great pain (I had just gotten off morphine and was still taking heavy doses of pain medication because of the surgery).  One would think that on an orthopedic surgery floor at a large urban hospital, the nurses, PA-Cs and hospitalists would have been trained to spot the red flags of CES.  After dropping my surgeon because of his failure to acknowledge my condition and treat it accordingly (by the way, I later discovered that my surgeon had even written an article about the "Red Flags of CES" on the internet site, Spine Universe), a spinal cord injury specialist ended up diagnosing my condition.  He told me that it was "pretty bad" that the patient had to diagnose herself.  It was clear by the time I dropped my surgeon that he knew that he had made a mistake but simply hoped that things might improve.  I eventually obtained my surgery records and discovered that indeed, a complication had occurred during my surgery (the spinal cord dura was torn and had to be repaired).  The report from the neurologist who was remotely following my surgery (a technician was monitoring my nerves in person) indicated that the electrical impulses that had been working properly at the start of the procedure never returned to "normal" and the surgeon had been notified of this.  I'm using non-medical terms here but I'm assuming you all understand this process.  I also ended up with an infection in my spine and had to have another operation to clean out the wound a week later then I had to have intravenous infusions of antibiotics twice a day for six weeks in order to make sure the infection was cured.  Before reading my surgery records, I had assumed that my CES was the result of this infection.  A year ago, a neurosurgeon that I ended up going to finally told me that it was his opinion that the surgeon just basically smashed my cauda equina nerves when hammering in the screws of the "cage" that was being put in my spine.  I guess I'll never know exactly what caused it but for sure -- it was the result of my surgery as all of the symptoms that I have now were not there prior to the surgery.