Should I get Mobi-C Cervical Disc Replacement C6-C7?
Hi everyone,
I'm looking for a little advice right now on a surgery I have scheduled for next week (Anterior Cervical Disc Replacement). Maybe I'm just getting cold feet as I've never had a surgery before (40 year old male), but I'm starting to stress out a bit about this. Please bear with me a little bit as I explain the context.
Back in early November I had a sports accident where my head snapped back and to the left, herniating the disc between C6-C7 on the left. I immediately had left hand finger pain and a couple of days later started getting a ton of neck pain. Took me a while to figure out the issue as I tried chiropractic care and acupuncture first in November and December. By December, I was in massive amounts of pain in my neck, left shoulder blade, and upper arm. My sleep at this time was severely impacted as well as I was only getting a couple of hours a sleep a night and everything was uncomfortable and in pain. In January, I was playing catch with my kid and my left arm right above the wrist was so swollen and painful that I thought my arm was broken. I was starting to lose a bit of grip strength as well. I went in for an x-ray and they found nothing, so I went to an orthopedic specialist and they ordered an MRI. At this point my whole arm was starting to go numb and I was getting pain and tingling down my whole arm to my fingers.
Of course, the MRI found the large herniation between C6-C7 with nerve and spinal coord compression and the doctor recommended the following steps:
- Oral steroids (didn't work)
- Anti-inflammatory meds (didn't work)
- Epidural injections (didn't work)
- 6 weeks of PT (didn't work)
- Gabapentin (didn't work initially)
I'm sure there were other meds I'm missing, but essentially, nothing was working, so at the beginning of March we scheduled the surgery option. Since then, I've been on an increased dosage of Gabapentin (600mg 3-4 times daily) and have continued to go to PT.
Over the past month or so, I've started to feel a lot better, although the symptoms haven't fully resolved. There have been a couple of times where I've gone off the pain meds for a day+ and the symptoms have started to come back, although not as intense as they had been previously. The surgery is now a week out. I'm starting to freak out a bit that I don't actually need the surgery and this isn't something I can't take this back once the surgery has happened. All the symptoms are still there, but just way less intense. I just don't know if I'm actually getting better or if this is just the build-up of Gabapentin in my body. Symptoms I still have include (but are WAY less intense than they were):
- Neck pain - especially acute pain when moving my head back and to the left
- Shoulder blade tension and pain
- Upper arm pain
- Forearm feeling swollen (have to take my watch off)
- Numbness and tingling in my arm all the way through my fingers
- Grip pain
Again, the symptoms are way less than they were and I'm sleeping fine. However, I don't want to be on pain meds forever and I want to be able to get back to an active lifestyle (I've basically stopped most forms of exercise). Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.