Simone needs spine surgery for a normal life

Hi, my name is Marie, and I am fundraising for my daughter, Simone, so that she can return to a normal life free of chronic lower back pain. She needs surgery, so she can stop having to think very cautiously about her day-to-day actions and avoid those actions that will cause her pain the next day.

She dreams of hiking again as she used to in her cover photo. She dreams of sitting at her work desk in a normal ergonomic chair and not the yellow milk crate because the crate hurts less.

She dreams of not needing to take a muscle relaxer before grocery shopping because walking on a hard surface really hurts. She dreams of not needing to find a driver when travelling for more than 30 minutes because pressing on the gas pedal and brake hurts her whole right side – the bad side.

Simone got injured during high school sports and has had chronic lower back pain for the 12 years since then. In the last couple of years, the pain has gotten really bad, and she has needed to change how she lives her life, as I described above. Several times, she’s had to go on bed rest for a few days with lots of ice packs and painkillers. A couple of times, it’s gotten so bad that she lost all use of her legs and had to use upper body strength to army crawl to the bathroom and then call for help.

Over the last decade, she has tried everything to get better, doing many, many rounds of all the specialists, including family doctors, physiotherapists, chiropractors, massage therapists, and acupuncturists. Luckily, she has a supportive employer, and this past winter, she was able to spend five months with me in Edmonton, AB, while remote working to her job in rural northern BC. Living with me was the only way to see specialists more often and add in visits to the naturopathic doctor for prolotherapy injections and a personal trainer for core strengthening. Seeing more specialists more frequently worked pretty well until she sneezed the wrong way, and then it was back to square one.

We finally found out what was wrong when Simone had an MRI in early 2022. The imaging showed that she has disc degeneration, disc protrusion and olisthesis (vertebrae slippage). In fact, the imaging clearly shows that two discs are black (see spine photo below inside the red oval) when they should be grey, meaning these discs are diseased. No wonder she’s in constant pain!

She has talked with several people who have fully and permanently fixed their own similar chronic pain with an advanced surgery technique offered in Germany called artificial disc replacement. They are ecstatic about their return to normal life. Simone wants this too! She has looked at the fusion surgery available in Canada that would fix the pain, but it would leave her with reduced mobility. Even so, at 28 years of age, doctors have told her she is too young for fusion surgery, regardless of her pain. She must suffer with conventional treatments until she is middle-aged which is when they would consider this kind of surgery for her.

The German doctors have examined Simone’s medical history and say they can heal her. Her youth is not a problem. We are very excited by the hope for a normal life for Simone but are anxious about the crippling debt entailed. The cost for this German surgery is $72,000 for the surgery, hospitalization, and post-op care, and it must all be pre-paid before booking the surgery. No part of this cost is covered by Canadian health insurance.

We are doing everything we can to pull together our savings, but it won’t be enough. We humbly ask for your help to either share this post or make a small donation to this GoFundMe campaign by the end of this year.

If all goes well, we hope to get the surgery Simone needs by early 2023. Thank you for helping!