Spinal Headaches and Steve Kerr

[DonRocks]

One thing I noticed about Steve Kerr was how *not* in pain he was last night.

Last month, he had a "spinal cord leak" from a surgery he had two years ago - this is very, very unusual to happen so long into the future, and the fact that his "blood patch" didn't work instantly is also unusual (and troubling). But, apparently, something worked: I can assure people that last night, he did not have a "spinal headache," and was in little or no pain.

A "spinal cord leak" can happen anytime you have a needle invading your dura - when it happens, the puncture - for whatever reason - doesn't close (in my case, it's because I went to the gym that afternoon and did 3 sets of lat pulls ), and you drip spinal fluid - just like a leaky faucet - and the drop in cerebrospinal fluid pressure causes a (surprisingly harmless) headache that I can only describe as being a "9 out of 10."

(I always said it was a "10 out of 10," until a few years later, I woke up from washout surgery without analgesia (they wash you out with a copious amount of acidic fluid *after* dislocating your hip), and I spent the next 30 minutes screaming at the top of my lungs, begging them to kill me (*that*, incidentally, was a 10 out of 10 - pain so intense that you no longer have any connection to reality or concern for existence: the equivalent of being disemboweled with hot tongs (picture Mel Gibson in "Braveheart"))). Any patient who walks into a doctor's office and says their pain is an "8 out of 10" doesn't know what they're talking about, or is exaggerating to get attention (8-out-of-10 pain will have you rolling around on the ground asking for help; not having a conversation with a physician).

Still, if you have a spinal headache, the pain is so bad that you'll quickly lose consciousness if you're standing or sitting; fortunately, if you lie flat, the pain almost immediately drops down to a "zero," and your headache goes away as long as you're lying down. (Visualize your humble narrator trying to drive himself to the emergency room *while lying down* - I made it as far as a CVS, and then had to have a cashier call me a cab, where I was lying down in the back seat, trying to explain to the driver that I'd be okay as long as I got to the E.R.)

The way they fix it is to draw some blood from your arm, and inject it into the point of the leak, and it clots almost immediately, and seals the leak. I walked out of the ER several hours after I walked into it, and I was fine (no more lat pulls that week).

The good news, for Steve Kerr, is that when a spinal leak is fixed, it's completely fixed, with absolutely no remaining symptoms (unless, for some reason, it starts to leak again - but I've never heard of this before: What happened with Kerr is extremely unusual (this should be a routine, outpatient procedure; yet, he flew across the country to have it done), and boy do I wish him the very best because, brother, I know what it's like).