missed_out

I have bilateral pars defect at L5 with a grade I Spondylolisthesis. Local doctors want to fuse L3-L5, or I will be in a wheelchair within 5 years. For younger people that may be their only option. Non-local doctors do not recomend fusion.

15 years later, no fusion, no wheelchair.

This is what I did and do:

1. Educate myself a. search: stuart mcgill waterloo university. b. Understand spinal stability and core excercises c. Walk! not stroll! (i do 6 miles at least 3 times a week. Sitting is the new Smoking! 2. Listen to your body! I have learned to recognise that my back is close to a traumatic event. 3. When my back goes out, a short rest, but keep moving. 4. Fully understand that excercising will cause irritation, but it is tolerable versus when my back goes out. 5. Medications: Soma, flexeril, and tramadol (NSAIDs such as ibuprohen trash my GI) After an event, I take the Soma and tramadol to help me keep moving. Daytime, they both will keep me awake. At night, flexeril. It works best on muscle spasms which exhausts the muscles which leads to pain. And it puts me to sleep. I will use these meds for a short period of time every 5-6 months! 6. Streching and doing it correctly is very important. 7. Getting out of a chair, use your legs! DO NOT lean forward to pull yourself upright! 8. You may want to wear a simple lifting belt. Not for support but to remind yourself not to put your lower back in a stressfull position. 9. Understand that "correct" posture sitting may not be a good idea for long periods of time. 10. If the problem is the lower back, educate yourself on the function and stretching of the Psoas muscle. It is a fast twitch muscle, and sitting contracts the muscle. Quick and sudden contraction puts tremendous pressure on the discs. 11. Try to keep your spine in its natural position, maintaining symmetry is critical. Yeah, it is uncomfortable, but the lack of symmetry will impede recovery. 12. If you have imaging done, demand copies on a CD. This will help you to seek additional opinions.

After 28 years of DoD service, civilian engineer, I just called it quits. I got tired of the retaliation for turning in security violations. The last one: sharing of passwords on a secured network. One violator's response: Where is it written we cannot share passwords? Why the retaliation? It portrays a bad image. Nice!

This is what I observed at McClellan AFB during my time there. No matter how hard I fought to do the work as a government engineer, management continuously turned the work over to contractors. As to why? I was taken aside and given the most ridiculous reason. If the project fails or overruns, the manager just gets more money to give to the contractor. Being screwed by the contractor was acceptable. But if done organically and there were problems, the manager gets a ton of grief. But this is the government, what terrible fate will come down on the manager? I also noticed that a lot of these managers retired from government service ended up working for the contractors, and the process recycles itself. This came back to bite McClellan AFB in the arse later. Come BRAC time, the contractors made it an easy choice to close the base by taking the work back their sites at a much reduced cost.

At one time, government engineers were in equal standing with contractor engineers. As defense spending dwindled down after the Vietnam war, defense contractors began to lobby for more control of defense workloads. On a contract, the government engineers would maintain the product and defense contractors did the development. Money set aside for documentation was devoured by the contractors so that only the contractors had the knowledge base of the product. Future weapon system development is the money maker for contractors, so to have them bid on upgrading a weapon system such as this, the cost would be very inflated. So you have this situation where the government cannot organically do the job either because of loss of expertise or documentation of the system. Or it is cost prohibitive using a defense contractor. The expertise for government oversight for contracting is a major problem. As an example, the DMV database system for the state of California. When you look at all the companies today using the cloud and creating huge databases practically overnight, how can projects like this fail. Another example, the Obama Care website. The government at every level, just does not have the expertise to insure that contractors perform to the letter of the contract. And then you have all this lobbying crap by the contractors to contend with. It really comes down to ETHICS. Contractors are not out to give you the most bang for your buck, they want the most bucks for smallest bang. After spending 28 years working with defense contractor engineers, I was not impressed. Unfortunately, I was not impressed with the ethics or the adherence to security concerns of my coworkers either, so I walked away. I would not be so concern with the 8 inch floppies, but more concern with the electronics that use them.