That felt like a miracle. Marisette V.
Marisette is a software engineer and a competitive rower, and for a while she had a reasonable explanation for the jolts of pain running down the backs of her legs: she sat at a desk all day. That explanation stopped working when the pain turned into numbness.
Over the following months her world narrowed quickly. Exercises she had done for years became impossible. She began losing sensation in her left foot, which cost her the balance she relied on and started putting her on the ground. Then the same symptoms crossed over to her right leg.
“It was getting so bad, I couldn’t even do a bridge exercise,” she says. The change was visible from one appointment to the next. “I walked into the surgeon’s office at first … then a wheelchair. It was obvious I was going downhill fast.”
Imaging showed spinal stenosis alongside a low-grade spondylolisthesis — a narrowed canal compressing the nerves, with one vertebra slipped forward on the one beneath it. Osteopenia complicated the picture, since the bone itself had less to hold on to.
In late July 2024, after a run of insurance delays, Dr. Agarwal performed a minimally invasive lateral lumbar interbody fusion at UPMC Presbyterian. Working from the side of the body rather than through the back muscles, he decompressed the compressed nerves and stabilized the segment that had slipped.
The relief registered immediately, and Marisette went home the same day. “That felt like a miracle,” she says.
Her recovery ran alongside two other findings that had turned up on the way: tumors on a kidney, which was removed on Christmas Eve of 2024, and a pancreatic cyst. Endoscopy showed the pancreatic lesion to be benign; it stays under monitoring, with a low risk of becoming anything more. The kidney surgery asked more of her than the spine surgery did, and kept her in the hospital three nights.
She has been gaining ground steadily since, with a plan to retire to Holland ahead of her. “I’m ready to move on and get back to what I love doing,” she says.