[annapurna]

How close to finishing your doctorate are you and what is your expected earning capability after you finish it and work full-time instead of working and attending school? You don't need to share that information with the community but looking at it that way, you might decide that you need to buy a few functional years and deal with what falls out of adjacent segment problems in the future when you can afford better treatment. For that matter, there are options for forestalling ADS for a while.

For that matter, you might need to rethink what you're getting your doctorate in. A PhD in Modern Dance isn't likely to be a good route for you now. On a more realistic note, something where you're constantly at a chalk or white board with your hands over your head writing and teaching could easily aggravate a healing cervical spine. The second is speculation that your body is likely to tell you more about. The first is hyperbole and sarcasm, but I have no doubt you spotted that already.

I think everyone here understands the desire to "take the exit ramp" even though some will regard it as drama rather than fear and despair talking. All I can say is that don't start changing lanes until you're sure the road is taking you to a place you don't want to go.

To buy time, you might check into disectomy for C45 and 67. Yes, it will weaken those disks and enhance the chance you'd need something in the future but it'll buy time to, as Laura's PhD advisor phrased it, "speculate and graduate." Alternatively, the prolotherapist we see occasionally outside of Salt Lake City also occasionally works out of Phoenix. That's almost never covered by insurance so you'd need to really take time talking through what he can and can't do for C45 and C67 to be sure it's worth the costs but your out of pocket cost for his treatments are likely to be on the order of your copays for surgery for those levels.

The ideas I'm suggesting are out of the box ideas that are really aimed to trigger thoughts or suggest venues for you to research. I'd expect that most of them aren't going to work for one reason or another so don't give up because we haven't found something that can help yet.