Natalie Siebels

Thought I would add some info about all Natalie has been going through to get to this point of having what will hopefully be a life changing surgery. Started roughly a year ago. She had neck pain/stiffness and at time headaches. This all coincided with her tennis season. It was at this point we tried a chiropractor, they took an X-ray and thought maybe she had “text neck”. Honestly, this sounded pretty reasonable since she spends a lot of time on her phone. Headaches continued to get worse as her tennis season went on and became much worse with the start of school. Decided to talk with her pediatrician and ended up deciding to try physical therapy. They were fine with referring her to the same therapist I used for my back. Headaches/neck pain was really causing a lot of problems at school. Most days she would have to go to the nurse to ice just to get through the rest of the day. She was starting to have more nerve issues down her back and into her arms, especially her hands. The goal with physical therapy was to gain strength, increase mobility and blood flow to her neck muscles. She worked very hard and it helped. Headaches became better and she could get through the day without one. We thought possibly with the start of this years tennis season she might be good. Two days into her tennis camp she did awesome, the third day everything changed. All of her symptoms came back and they were worse. Very scary! Knew we needed to do more diagnostics. It was too much and Natalie knew it had to be something more. Mostly we were told it was migraines but it didn’t make a whole lot of sense with all her nerve issues. Another visit to the pediatrician and we scheduled a MRI. MRI results showed Chiari Malformations type 1. It was a shock to say the least. We had to wait another 2 weeks to get an appointment with a neurosurgeon. We decided not to tell Natalie or anyone else until we knew more about her specific case. So that is were we are at today. The surgeon feels confident she will get relief....90%. She could decide not to have the surgery but would have to limit activity and be conservative. Surgeon said most people who have symptoms eventually end up getting the surgery. Chiari Decompression. It is all very positive but we need to get through the scary part of the surgery.

Natalie is doing very well with all this...in her words she is good😊.