@upstatephil Phil, that is a fantastic reply, so thank you! I hope I wasn't putting you on the spot too much by asking these questions, but I knew you would have an interesting perspective on this.

I think you were smart to be a bit conservative and do fewer operated levels than the "Full Monty". That could be addressed in the future if you felt more surgery would benefit you. I am glad that your surgeons gave you choices, and to me, that shows that the surgeon is listening to the patient's concerns. That is the kind of surgeon I want to see when I'm in a situation like this.

Recovery is slow. After all, you need to grow some new bone to fill a void and that takes time. If you break a bone, the doctor puts it back together and the parts are touching each other, so bridging that with new bone isn't traveling as far as a fusion in the spine where bone needs to fill a space the thickness of a disc that was removed. It just takes a lot longer than a typical fracture repair. With a fusion, if a donor bone disc is used, there are no bone cells in it. It is a mineral matrix excreted by the donor's bone cells, but it has been cleaned of cells and is a just a scaffold. With a fracture, putting that together is putting pieces together that are the matrix and the living bone cells within it, so it is primed to begin the repair. I remember being very tired after my single level fusion and sleeping a lot because my body was directing all my energy to healing. Phil's experience of having 2 major surgeries with multilevel fusions in less than a year is asking a lot of the body to do it's magic in healing.

My experience of a single level cervical fusion was it took 3-4 months for the bone to start to fuse, and by my own choice, I was in a cervical collar for all of that because I asked for a fusion without hardware. It took about 6 months for me to stop noticing that I had spine surgery. I was working on the tightness of the scar tissue with myofascial release with my physical therapist, and I still work on it because it periodically tightens up, and I can keep things moving better if I stretch. My motion with a singe level fused isn't very different than before surgery, so my experience is different than Phil's because of several levels he had fused in each of this surgeries.

If anyone else wanted to share their decision making process to go forward with spine surgery, please jump in. This is a valuable discussion. We're all different in what we need and how we recover.