Brewster,
Condolences on your miserable condition, and welcome. There are many Canucks on this site and most tell a story very similar yours.
First to your easy question; why do so many of us go to Europe for surgery? There are multiple reasons:
- US insurance carriers routinely deny ADR and it is much cheaper to pay out of pocket for ADR in Europe than in the US
- fusion is known to cause problems necessitating a second and even third fusion
- European surgeons have up to 25 years of experience in ADR where US surgeons have (generally) less than half that
- European surgeons have available to them 2nd and 3rd generation ADR devices where due to litigation and the FDA, US surgeons are limited to only 1st generation ADR devices
- it has been my observation from experiences on this site that patients that go to Europe for ADR surgery almost always have successful outcomes, where the success rates for those having ADR surgery in the US is much lower
Don't let that dissuade you from seeking help within the US system, but relatively primitive as I believe our US system of spine care to be, I have seen a great many successful outcomes within that system. Where ADR is concerned, I am hard pressed to say the same thing about the Canadian system; in fact, I've never seen a kind word spoken of that system.
I would encourage you to spend a lot of time reading in the "Surgical Outcome" forum of this site and all others that you can find. Whatever decision you make, you alone are the one that will have to live with it. There is NO substitute for research.
Good luck, Jeff