Update!
Well, I saw a neurosurgeon here in Raleigh today - his name is Dr. Mikles, and he did his training up in NY. He has done 20 ADR surgeries, but they were all Prodisc procedures, not Charite. He seemed like an intelligent, patient guy, so that was reassuring, assuming I do go ahead and have the surgery eventually and choose him as the one to do the procedure.
He took a couple more x-rays of me there at the office in flexion and extension, and my spinal column was lined up well, so that's good - apparently that makes me a better candidate for surgery.
It looks like the next stop for me will be a discogram followed by a CAT scan at the local hospital sometime within the next month. I'm also going to do some PT on my neck over the next four weeks (and my lower back some more while I'm at it - why not), so we'll see how that goes.
The good news is that the doc was not concerned about the small herniation at L5-S1. He said that if the two degenerative discs were adjacent to each other (rather than being separated by my healthy looking L4/5), then I probably wouldn't be a candidate for surgery. But for now, I appear to have the green light! I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that the discogram yields the desired result - that all of my pain is coming from the pretty obvious DDD at L3/4 and nowhere else.
Also, I mentioned the whole episacral lipoma (aka back mouse... see my last post in this thread) thing to him, and he didn't seem to know what I was talking about.
Oh well... I guess I can always get that looked at after I have surgery.
Well, wish me luck! I'll post a couple of shots from my MRIs and one of my x-rays here momentarily.