@jennleigh19 Advocating for yourself is very important. The ability to do that comes from learning as much as you can about your own health and how conditions can influence each other. I had to keep advocating for myself and while I was doing that, I was also facing fear of surgery that I knew was needed. C5/C6 is a spinal level easily affected by a whiplash injury.

It is your choice if you want to do spinal injections or not. They can be beneficial, but also not so good if too many are done or if there are adverse effects. Your doctors will not understand the whole picture all the time of what you are going through. Some are better at it than others, but specialists tend to look at their own slice of that puzzle. It's your job as a patient to remind them of adverse reactions you have had because they may not notice information in your records and may not have time to read prior records.

Looking healthy could mean different things, and many issues can exist in patients who look healthy. Spines do change with aging, and problems that were not so bad can in time get much worse as the discs dry out and shrink a bit. That is normal aging, but it doesn't help if there is an injury like a weak disc that can open up with a crack and eventually rupture. My C5/C6 ruptured which caused bone spurs to grown next to the spilled nucleus which caused spinal cord compression. My disc had collapsed by 50% and I lost a quarter inch in height because of it. After spine surgery, I regained my normal height.

Are you planning to consult with a spine surgeon about surgery? I know that is a big step, and forgive me if you'd already mentioned it. I had to consult 6 surgeons before I found one who would take my case. It shouldn't be that hard to be a patient, but the symptoms in my case scared a bunch of them out of helping me. Surgeons don't want to fail, and their statistics are recorded, so it is easier for them to pass on helping surgically and send a patient for injections or therapy. When I felt frustrated by all of this searching, it as my dentist who told me that I wouldn't really want a surgeon operating on me if he didn't know what was wrong or why I had symptoms. Well said. I kept searching and found the best one at Mayo. When I had spine surgery, I was in my late 50's.