I am a grateful, happy househusband. My wife, Linda, bore us twins twenty years ago when she was thirty-six. She carried our daughters to full term and was as big as a cement truck at nine months. The babies fought each other for purchase to the birth canal for twenty-two hours before Linda glowered at her GYN and said, "Cut me."

Our daughters were surgically excised at a combined weight of fourteen pounds, pretty hefty for even the strongest woman. Linda was tall and willowy and didn't notice the effects for five years when she began to feel back pain at L-5 and sciatica.

She ignored it for another five years until the pain reached a level that interfered with her job as a paralegal. Like most families, we needed two incomes to achieve the American Dream and she sought the assistance of the medical establishment to relieve her pain. The result was ten more years of pain management, but no cure, after it was discovered that her disk at L-5 was pinching the nerve in her spine. Her pain was often monumental and I worked hard to minimize her efforts around the house.

By the time the girls were twenty and away from home, I'd been a househusband for a couple of years. Semi-retired from the workforce didn't mean I could lounge around drinking Pina Coladas. Linda worked every day at a law office and I took on the task of housecleaning to keep her from hurting her back trying to help.

She finally took the risk of surgery to repair the disk instead of using painkillers that hid the problem. It was a hard decision. Back surgery was a shady business without a promising record of success. Too many doctors were known for their "experiments" that often resulted in worse pain instead of less. But the discipline had improved over the decades and the success rate had improved to 85% with some surgeons. The twins were gone and she had a brief opportunity for the surgery before Blue Cross-Blue Shield, in a spectacular display of bottom-line self-interest, made back surgery cost prohibitive for the firm's health insurance policy.

Her boss, a decent man, warned her of the impending changes to her healthcare coverage and Linda decided to go for it.

Her immediate recovery period would be a minimum of two months with a steady incline to perfect health expected in six to eight months. She arranged with her boss to take two months off and went into surgery.

Anterior Lumbar Fusion-meaning the surgeon accessed her disk at L-5 through her stomach, past her

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