Prayers for my Dad

Please pray for my dad if you get a chance. For a while now he's been having back pain that was always just diagnosed as sciatica. It has recently gotten much worse however; I was talking to him on the phone today and he was saying that he can't even walk through a store for more than 10 minutes with my mom before he has to go back to the car to sit down because of the pain. My dad is a very active guy who's always working on something at the house or someone's car and it kills him to not be able to move around all that much. He only just turned 52 so he's not even that old!

He (smartly) decided it was time to go to the doctor. He had some X-rays done and was sent to a neurologist. After an MRI and then (today) a CT scan the neurologist told him that he has a condition known as spondylolisthesis. What this is is that either some of the joints in his lumbar vertebrae (in his case L4-L5) or even a part of the vertebrae is damaged or fractured. This causes the vertebrae to become unstable and the top vertbrae slips forward on top of the lower vertebrae. This can cause arthritic changes but also can compress spinal nerves (and the spinal cord itself) as it's doing in my dad. The doctor told my dad that they're not sure the severity of it yet (they will have more of an idea when they get the CT results back) but if he were to leave this alone, he wouldn't be able to walk in two years. Please pray that the doctors are able to make the right call on what's going on for my dad. If it's either grade I or II (not as severe; only slipped 25-50% out of place) then they'll probably try bracing it or physical therapy first. If it's slipped greater than 50% (Grades III and IV) then he'll have to have surgery (most likely) to fuse those vertebrae to keep them from slipping even farther.

I'd appreciate any prayers you could say for my dad as we're all really concerned about this. As much as we don't want him to have to go through back surgery and all that entails, this has to be fixed and soon! Thanks friends...

Love you all!