Kaiser Permanente Doctor Brings Alane Gernon - Paulsen relief from chronic back pain

My name is Alane Gernon Paulsen. I used to play a sport called ultimate Frisbee and it's a lot of running and twisting and turning. It's very similar to soccer. We were practicing one day and I just turned to look over my shoulder while I was running, and I guess that's when the disc herniated and I just hit the ground. I was in so much pain. I saw two different doctors and they told me I had herniated discs. I had an MRI and I was just destroyed, you know. I was 24 years old, just finished college. My whole life was built around this sport that I played. It was like three years before I could actually go back and play. So I spent three years just trying to get it to stop hurting. And then it started coming back, but it was never the severe pain down the leg, the siatic pain. It was just this real chronic backache and nobody really knows how to treat that chronic backache because if you don't have pain down the leg, there's no surgery. I just had to deal with a certain amount of pain all the time. It's really wearing. It just wears you down. You're just not yourself. Always feeling out of it and on-edge and just changes your personality. She came to me with really debilitating lower back pain and she has severe degenerative changes of her spine for her young age. She'd been to interventional anesthesiologists. She's visited with orthopedic surgeons. She had lots of different medications, physical therapy. None of them seemed to work. She eventually ended up in a surgeon's office who only offered her lamar fusion as the only treatment left to her. She's very frustrated because she didn't want to have the surgery. And she came to me and after various treatments, we ended up doing a certain type of injection therapy that she responded really well to. The injected medication into my back, it's really given me great relief. And I just think back to times before we found this regimen. I mean, my own wedding, I just remember it took me forever to find shoes that I could wear because if I wear too high a heel, it hurts. And even with the low heels, by the end of the day on my wedding day, I was just in agony. So I've always been really thankful that Dr. Jaffe's always been open to trying pretty much everything possible. Right now, I'd say for the last couple years, I've been pretty much pain-free in the back. I've been following her every three months now for the past four years in keeping her not only pain-free, but she's very functional now with the child and her work, and she's been a real success story. He's really improved my life, my quality of life, a ton. Yeah, it's a real big difference.