My recent Experience with Fail back surgery

I know its been a while since i have put something on my blog. Well, i was little bit busy in developing my practise. I am here today to describe about my recent experience with a failed back surgery.
A patient was referred to me by a very senior orthopaedic surgeon from Bhavnagar. Patient was an OT assistant at Sir T. Hospital, Bhavnagar. That patient was operated for L4-L5 laminectomy about 5 to 6 years back. Patient was okay for say about 4 months after surgery and than started having sever back pain and inability to walk.
When he was referred to me ... i could notice that the patient has significant difficulty in walking .. with sever back pain. When i analysed the patient ... during the first surgery done somewhere else , they had done partial laminectomy (central) and than probably while doing so the previous surgeon might have done a dural damage so he left the surgery at that point and started decompressing by removing the facets. Now, some how they could manage to remove the facets but they could not decompress the foramen properly so , the nerves were still under compression.
When i looked at the xrays, the L4 vertebrae had shifted anteriorly quite significantly with total collapse of disc and on MRI there was very dense fibrosis due to injury to dura during the first surgery.
SO, it was infact a very challenging task to operate in a mutilated bed and decompress the nerves.

I took about 5 hours to decompress the roots on the both sides and than put an interbody cage with pedicle screws to make the posterior TLIF through a dense bed of fibrous tissue.

The surgery was completed successfully without any complication and patient started to walk just after 5 hours of surgery. Today we have completed about 21 days of follow up and patient is extremely happy.

SO, what i feel is failed back surgeries or revision spine surgeries are equally rewarding if done by an experienced surgeon in spinal surgeries.