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Originally Posted by annapurna
I've been thinking about what we could offer for advice. The problem that I see is that finding ways to travel cheaply is relatively easy; finding ways to pay for medical care you can't afford outright isn't.
The only thought I had was to check into Dr. Yue in Phoenix to get a second opinion. Your profile says you're in Arizona so I'm hoping that you're realistically close to Phoenix. Yue specializes in endoscopic disectomies but he's world-class in that. He might, if approached ahead of time, be willing to have you come in to review your situation and serve as a second opinion and source of guidance. Rarely will you ever find a doctor willing to say another doctor screwed up, so I wouldn't even try to ask that kind of question, but he might weigh in on what options you have from here.
Also, there's an off chance that the lack of fusion was affected by outstanding medical issues on your part. It might be worthwhile trying to get a general physical and blood work-up to see if anything stands out. If Yue is willing to see you, you might talk with him about what to ask for so you don't get the common brush-off you'd get from the standard doc-in-a-box.
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Thanks for trying to think of ideas--I do live in reach of Phoenix, so if he's on my insurance plan (or if he'd be willing to just review things for free), then that would be feasible. I guess the issue is...with anyone else, my only other recourse would be revising what I've got into a 2-level fusion, which, to be perfectly honest, doesn't sound like any better of an option. It's just everything you fear with an ACDF: endless surgeries, one level goes after another, and my C3/4 is already herniated too. If C4/5 is fused, C3/4 is next on the chopping block.
I actually don't think my current neurosurgeon screwed up: I'm just not fusing, and the other disc above it was already herniated. It just did what ACDFs are famous for: adjacent segment disease, which isn't a fault of surgical technique.
Although I can't be totally sure, as far as I knew I don't have any other health issues besides the migraines caused by the surgery. I had to do a really thorough physical before my NS would even do surgery, so: full bloodwork panel, EKG, chest x-rays, bone density tests, all that stuff. Since then I've had issues with migraines so I've been in the hospital and back and forth to my primary care really frequently since then. I had a potentially bad reaction to one of the migraine drugs, so I just had another full blood panel, and really fancy cardiac tests (nuclear PET scan stress test, echocardiogram, more ekgs, repeat chest xray)--everything seems normal other than my damn spine and anything related to it. Even rechecked some other things like rheumatology panels and had a brain MRI to rule out MS just in case too. Not saying there might be something they're missing, but my multiple doctors seem to think I'm okay otherwise. I almost wish they'd find something wrong so it'd be fixable...