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Josephine DiMartino

Retired hairdresser Josephine DiMartino believes she knows what caused her back problems.

“I think it was from my work,” she says. “I was a hairdresser for forty years, so that’s a long time standing. Sometimes, we would stand ten hours a day in one spot, and with shampooing there’s a lot of leaning over.”

When Josephine began to experience problems in her lumbar spine, she found that the pain grew progressively more severe over time.

“What happened was that my discs just started rupturing,” she explains. “I could handle it for about the first six months, but then it started getting really bad. I was in pain for almost a year, and it kept getting worse and worse.”

As the pain became less tolerable, Josephine began to make a determined effort to find the cause.

“I went to vocational rehabilitation, because I don’t have insurance, and they sent me for an MRI,” she says. “That was wonderful because then they could actually see my spine. I had three ruptured discs pressing on my sciatic nerve.”

Josephine consulted an orthopedic physician, but because of her lack of health insurance, she had to pay for her entire treatment herself. Unfortunately, it proved unsuccessful.

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