Blair Allan knew exactly what it looked like to the Urgent Care team in Los Angeles: A late-20s, healthy woman who had suffered no injury, showing up to the Urgent Care complaining of pain and asking for relief. It’s September 2020. The opioid epidemic is in full swing. Blair forgives the nurses for their caution. But she can’t forget the dismissiveness and lack of care.
“I told the doctors, ‘I am not looking for a prescription. I am looking for answers.’ It takes a lot for me to say ‘Ouch.’ I knew something was wrong,” she said. “But the doctors and nurses [in LA} rolled their eyes. No one really helped.”
Blair soldiered through for three years of on and off pain. Sometimes it took her a half-hour to put on her pants. Some nights she could do nothing but pace, the pain was too intense for her to lay down.
“It got to the point where it was affecting my mental health,” she said. “You’re being gaslit by people, being told that it can’t be as bad as it is. I got into a really dark place. I was young, thinking, ‘Is this just how my life is going to be?’”
Then, in the late spring of 2023, Blair experienced a flare up of pain unlike any she had experienced before. Pain radiating from her left shoulder down her arm and ending in her fingers, which had gone numb.
Blair’s mother lives in Newport Beach, and she remembered with fondness the hospice care her father received at Hoag. Despite the pain, she drove herself from Santa Monica to Newport Beach.
“I’m sure driving made it worse, but I was desperate. Hoag has always been the trusted place for my family,” she said.
Blair said the team at Hoag viewed her ambiguous complaints of pain with caution, too. But at Hoag, she said, she was also met with respect. When she advocated for an MRI, she received one. And as soon as doctors took a look at what they saw, Blair’s life changed.
“They said, ‘There is something wrong. You are clearly in pain.’ After years of everyone saying, ‘There’s nothing wrong, there’s nothing wrong,’ I really appreciated it,” she said.
Blair then met Dr. Vik Mehta, M.D., a fellowship-trained Neurosurgeon at Hoag’s Spine Institute who specializes in minimally invasive spine surgery.
“He called me less than 10 hours later. You could tell he knew what he was talking about,” she said. “To have someone give me that validation after all this gaslighting, it did a lot for me. It was reassuring.”
Dr. Mehta explained that her MRI showed two large disc herniations in her neck. He laid out a few options, explaining each in detail. After researching those options and reading about Dr. Mehta’s expertise and experience, Blair chose to undergo two cervical artificial disc replacements. This minimally invasive option can be done as an outpatient and preserves motion in the spine. The benefit is immediate pain relief without having to wear a neck brace or having a fusion which limits motion in the neck.
“I told him, ‘I’ve done my research. You’re the doctor for me,’” she said. “I didn’t want injections. I want full relief so that I never feel like this again.”
And she has. A few weeks after her first call with Dr. Mehta, Blair underwent the disc replacement surgery. When she awoke, the pain was gone.
“I hadn’t realized how much I had normalized the pain,” she said. “To wake up and have it gone was phenomenal. And the people on the spine floor were so kind to me. It was light at the end of the tunnel.”
After only one week off, Blair returned to school (and aced her classes). She is now 31, pain-free and is filled with gratitude for Hoag and Dr. Mehta.
“By the grace of God, I got matched up with him,” she said. “He speaks at seminars, everything I read about him online was reassuring. And I really appreciated his approach, the way he broke it down. It made a lot of sense. I feel so blessed.”
