Sanjay Gupta

It's called a compression fracture.

So the vertebrae is like these blocks, one on top of the other, and one of them was sort of crushed down, so just lost a lot of height in what's called the L1, the top of the lumbar spine.

And she had terrible, terrible pain.

And, you know, I was already working on the book at that time.

And so I was very primed to think about these things.

But I don't think even I realized how much chronic pain just hijacks your entire identity.

Um, that's the thing, you know, you get diabetes or cancer and these are obviously terrible diseases, but you may not know looking at someone on the street that they have that with chronic pain, it's, it's your entire life.

Um, and I, I mean, I, you know, it's my mom, I obviously felt terrible for what was happening.

Um, and I, and I asked her the question, which is a ridiculous question now in retrospect, but you often want to ask how bad does it hurt?

And, um,

And, you know, then you say, well, on a scale of 1 to 10 or, you know, point to a frowny face versus a smiley face.

And all those are sort of ridiculous assessments now that I've gone through this personally.

And she basically said to me, if this pain continues, I just don't want to live anymore.

So my pain on a scale of 1 to 10 is I don't want to live anymore.

That's the answer.

She ended up doing well.

She got a procedure known as a kyphoplasty, which is a more minimally invasive procedure where they basically put a needle through the skin, through the back, a thing called the pedicle, which connects the back of your spine to the front of your spine, and

And into that crushed bone and then they blow it up with a balloon to sort of restore the height.

And then they put in a dollop of this substance which hardens into cement to sort of create an internal cast.

And I got to tell you, we weren't sure whether it was going to work in terms of her pain.