By Glenn Meyer

I’m ‘Walking Back to Happiness’ thanks to the amazing skills of the spinal surgical team at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, writes Glenn Meyer.

It started at a family barbecue. Relaxing in the sunshine in September 2020, I stretched out the footstool of my recliner chair, experienced excruciating pain and passed out. My family assumed I was having a heart attack and called an ambulance. But it turns out my ticker was fine; my spine was not.

Initial investigations showed I have a degenerative condition which has caused my lower back to gradually deform, narrowing the space where nerves sit and putting pressure on the discs.

That small movement of my legs caused three big bulges in the discs, one of which broke off and lodged in the channel where my spinal cord runs, jamming things up and causing pain – a lot of it.

Over the next three years, my pain levels increased and my mobility decreased. I changed from an active walker into a stooped shuffler and then to a wheelchair user. It was in that chair that I met Julian Leong, consultant spinal surgeon at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital (RNOH) in Stanmore.

RNOH is a world-class centre of excellence helping people throughout the UK and beyond to deal with complex orthopaedic conditions. The technology........

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