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Old 10-13-2021, 08:57 AM
annapurna annapurna is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2004
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The advice I'd give about decision-making is this: do your research now, while you feel like your back isn't too bad. Learn about options, read online, ask questions, and find surgeons who you'd like to work with if you do end up going the route of either fusion or ADR. Doing that while you're in relatively less pain makes it easier to make decisions. Your mind isn't clouded by pain or narcotics and you don't have a feeling of fear and urgency rushing you. Particularly, locating the surgeons and understanding the devices and surgical options they offer can take some time. Don't use a surgeon outside of their main comfort zone; a surgeon who does thousands of fusions and an occasional ADR isn't an ADR surgeon you want to seek out and vice versa.

While you're doing that, record somehow, journal or notes or whatever works for you, how your back is impacting your life every day. Not just pain but what you can and can't do. At the end of a few months, look over the journal to see if you can honestly say you're improving slowly, holding level, or getting slowly worse. If you're getting slowly worse, it's probably (remember I'm not a medical professional so my advice is just that of an opinionated engineer) time to look for more medical intervention. Whether you feel holding level is okay or needs more treatment is a hard call but you'll at least be making that decision with the best information available. You may find that you're improving slowly but the rate of improvement is so slow you don't notice unless you looked over long lengths of time.
__________________
Laura - L5S1 Charitee
C5/6 and 6/7 Prodisc C
Facet problems L4-S1
General joint hypermobility

Jim - C4/5, C5/6, L4/5 disk bulges and facet damage, L4/5 disk tears, currently using regenerative medicine to address

"There are many Annapurnas in the lives of men" Maurice Herzog
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