Long-avoided spinal fusion surgery changes everything

For eight years, Michelle Rannells dealt with pain. As a pediatric nurse who was on her feet a lot, she thought she had a pinched sciatica nerve, because the pain would come and go. After a shift at work, Michelle would head home and go to bed – sometimes for 17 hours straight. It was taking a toll on her and finally she had enough.

“You get used to living with so much pain,” she says. But with a family, a teenage granddaughter, and a little dog, she was missing out on things. “I can’t live like this,” she remembers deciding.

Never having had any type of surgery, she debated doing anything about it for a long time. “You see people come through it [back surgery] not so good, but I decided it couldn’t be any worse,” she said.

Michelle’s provider first referred her to get an MRI. The test showed pinched nerves for which the cause was unknown but could have been from wear and tear. Next, an anti-inflammatory injection right into the pinched nerve determined if and for how long she could get relief. It worked and surgery became an option. To this point, Michelle had never even used pain medication and gotten along by taking Aleve.

An appointment with Neurosurgeon Kashif Shaikh, MD, was set up. Because Michelle is young, 54 years old, Dr. Shaikh did not want to fuse too many vertebrae together, so only L4 and L5 were fused and two pins and clamps were placed at Michelle’s waistline, the lumbar region.

The surgery took around four hours and by the next day, Michelle could feel her toes – something that hadn’t been possible for three years.

“I had no pain,” Michelle says, explaining the difference in how she felt was huge. “When you have pain, you mask it.”

The nurses, whom she described as great, had her up walking five or six times a day. For recovery following her discharge, she followed Dr. Shaikh’s orders, which were to wear a brace and to rest. Michelle took a minimal amount of pain medication for only two weeks.

The surgery was in July 2023. After three months, Michelle feels the best she has felt in years. She’s lost 70 pounds, gained after being sedentary so many years, and people tell her she looks taller since she walks normally again, not hunched over and leaning to the left to offset the pain. Now, walking tall and sporting a new wardrobe from head to toe, she feels like a new person.

“My quality of life is so much better,” she says. “My body feels like I’m in my 20s again.”

Things have gone so well that Michelle’s husband is considering having the surgery, too. He was a paramedic for many years and for the last 10 years they have run the family’s funeral home, so lifting has put a toll on his back.

As for how Michelle feels about Dr. Shaikh, she says, “I couldn’t have done this without him. He saved my life.”