Transcript:
Her story starts out with a fall, pretty serious fall, from standing height. She slipped on a wood floor and landed very hard on her left side of her buttock. Two years later, she was getting into her hot tub and just had this sudden onset of severe sciatica pain.
When I sat down, it would be burning, intense pain. My left leg was numb. It would be swollen by the end of the day.
She had the piriformis release procedure by this orthopedic surgeon, and within a week, her symptoms were worse.
And one night, I was watching and looking on the internet, trying to find somebody to help me, and that’s when I saw the videos, the testimonials about Dr. Tollestrup. I was so impressed when I met him. He was extremely polite and caring and compassionate and easy to talk to, and I was impressed that he had read my records. He had read everything that I had had done, and I never had a physician that had done that before.
The first thing I did was go in and do the correct operation for piriformis syndrome, which is to entirely remove the piriformis muscle, and you have to get beyond the greater sciatic notch. It’s a technically challenging operation, and that’s why people don’t want to do it, and you have to understand all the other nerve anatomy in the deep gluteal space, or you can end up injuring other nerves.
Did a second procedure. I went in and resected all the branches of the posterior femoral cutaneous nerve, and that also is an operation where you really need to understand that anatomy because it’s easy to miss a branch otherwise. So we did that, and after that, she was totally pain-free posteriorly.
When people develop nerve pain, almost always, it doesn’t go recognized as such. It is mistaken for various spine or orthopedic problems. And a lot of times, these patients will have one, two, three, four, five, or more surgeries chasing what is really nerve pain, and that usually ends up making the problem worse because they damage more nerves and the patient is no better.
I would tell anyone that I would go to Dr. Tollestrup in a heartbeat. He’s brilliant, compassionate. He is, in his field, the top.