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Cervical degeneration after nearly 2 years getting worse

Spine Health | Last Active: Jul 12, 2024 | Replies (26)
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@ab6540183

Hi everyone,
how are you?

Last year I had neck laser surgery in Florida to decompress left C6, C7 nerves. The Deukspine surgery was a failure because my pain has increased a lot more since in August 2023. Dr Deuk promised me that I would be pain free but that was not the case.

It's been nearly 12 months and my neck has been gradually getting worse. I have extreme chronic pain between left C4-C5, C5-C6, C6-C7 and C7-T1.

I feel bad numbness in my neck, painful pins and needles, referred pain in shoulders, shoulder blades, arms, hand, fingers, back, groin, legs and feet.

Since 7 days ago, my neck tension, stiffness, pain, pins/needles, numness has increased dramatically, it is full on as if something is biting, catching inside. At the same time I feel numbness in my groin, legs, feet and toes. The left foot pain is very bad, it feels extremely tight, numb everywhere as well as the leg.

I am not able to relieve the neck pain, not even with strong opiods. I tried gentle stretches, traction, posture, heat, cold, massage, deep breathing but nothing works.

I am going nuts. The pain, the numbness is stressiong me out a lot. I noticed that the pain in the neck is proportional to the pain in the leg and foot. The more numbness in the neck, the more numbness in the foot and leg.

I just wanted to mention that my MRI shows the disc pressing close to the spinal cord. The doctors have excluded spinal stenosis but this area hurts a lot together with the C6, C7.

I have been to the GP here in Melbourne Australia but he has no clues apart from throwing more drugs at the problem.
The hospital has the same attitude.

I asked them to investigate or at least take a new scan of my neck area but they are not being very helpful because the do not deem my problem are as urgent as other emergencies.

I am left with the physiotherapist that has tried, but I still have severe pain, referred pain, tightness, spasms everywhere. in the neck and feet.

I haven't been able to sleep for 5 days and feel exhausted.

Now I have nausea, inability to focus.

Could something be pressing on my cervical spinal cord?
Does anyone have any ideas?

Thank you.

Best regards

Alfred

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Replies to "Hi everyone, how are you? Last year I had neck laser surgery in Florida to decompress..."
Cassie Marie | @csalter | Jul 5, 2024

Alfred,

Have you ever considered that the symptoms could be cause from instability?

They did a decompression, but no fusion?

Usually, muscle spasms and tightness can indicate your muscles are working overtime in order to try and stabilize your cervical region.

I am certain I do have some instability. I have similar symptoms and more. Your neck can affect so many things, including dysautonomic dysfunction.

Have you ever had any accidents like motorvehicle, or others?

I am hypermobile (hymobile ehlers danlos) and have had some horse riding accidents in the past.

There are some very knowledgeable groups on FB about cervical instability.

Unfortunately, there are very few surgeons in the world that are knowledgeable about it and perform surgery. Which to me is surprising, as I'm sure there are more people with it, than we realize.

It affects my quality of life greatly. I do stretches, see a Chiropractor that doesn't use rough manipulation, muscle relaxers etc. I am now doing injections to numb the facet joints, which helps a little. Than ablation. Ablation, won't exactly help a lot of the symptoms, like nausea, dizziness, fatigue, dysautonomia (which regulates so much in our body) the various headaches, migraines and cervical neuralgia.

Best of luck. It's a long stressful road. I pretty much gave up finding a surgeon, as they are so busy. (The ones in the US). My insurance covers Mayo, and anything outside of that is not covered, therefore out of pocket. I don't have 50k to drop on a surgery. If it continues to worsen, I hope that I honestly don't live another 20 years. (I'm 40 right now). I currently work about 35 hours a week. I would like to go back to school to get bachelors in nursing, but I am exhausted just with work and daily life. I don't have a choice to go on disability. It involves a lot in the US. Plus, I would rather not be on disability. Mentally and physically it's better for me to work. I just want a better quality of life.

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