[JinSong]

I actually made a separate thread for this question, but I thought maybe for consistency in case anyone is following this in the future that I might post it here too. Here's the latest with my decision-making process:

This week was super busy with surgical consults for me, and now I'm at the point where I just have to make a decision. I've seen three surgeons in total now, and of course each had slightly different opinions of what kind of surgery to do (or not do).

I had a remote third opinion earlier in the month with a surgeon in the city north of me, which preliminarily said that he would do an ADR with the Mobi-C implant. I was super happy, because my first surgeon used the Pro-disc, which I wasn't sure about, and then I was unable to get an appointment to ask more questions about it until very close to the surgery.

Two days ago I saw the other surgeon in person. I was excited because I thought I already knew what he would say, given that he'd already written up an initial opinion. However, this surgeon had me get a new MRI, and also had me do flexion/extension x-rays. So then he tells me that on the x-rays have retrolisthesis, and because of that, he would no longer want to do the ADR; he'd want to do a regular fusion instead. I understood the rationale perfectly, but I was pretty upset because I've been so sure that ADR is the way to go, and the second surgeon I saw told me to avoid a fusion basically until things were really dire.

Given that information, I tried to push harder to have a follow-up consultation with my first surgeon. I must be getting better at this whole medical office persuasion business, because I got an appointment for the next morning! I tell the original surgeon what the other guy said about the retrolisthesis/fusion thing. He looked at my films and said yeah, there is in fact some retrolisthesis there, but it's really mild, and that he would still prefer to do the ADR. In fact, he said if it was his own neck, and his films looked like mine, he would put an ADR in his own spine. He was definitely confident.

Then I brought up my concerns about the Pro-disc, and he said that he usually defaults to the Pro-disc for a single-level ADR because it's got the most data on it, since it's older. To my surprise, then he said that if I felt more comfortable about the Mobi-C, he does use that one too, and he would have no problem using the Mobi-C instead if I wanted it! I was so happy because that was pretty much everything I was hoping to hear, but didn't think I would.

So now I guess my only concerns now are about the retrolisthesis issue--both surgeons seem equally and diametrically confident that it either is or is not a problem for the ADR. I obviously really prefer the ADR option, but I just want to make sure I'm not making a foolish decision by ignoring the third surgeon and his concerns about the retrolisthesis.