@camendola9 Your surgeon will put a weight lifting restriction on you after surgery. Mine started at 10 pounds. My surgeon would only do a single level without hardware. I stayed in a neck brace for 3 months. That’s a lot of trust from a surgeon to allow that. My body does not like metals. I also had broken my ankle a few years after spine surgery and I reacted to the hardware and had it removed. That was a year and a half after the injury and I was living with pain from the hardware, chronic hives and getting skin pigmentation over the plates on my ankle. There are tests for reactions to materials, but you can develop the response after a period of time. That was 6 months with my ankle. I guessed right when I did spine surgery. If you have a metal cage or implant that becomes embedded by bone growth in the spine, it wouldn’t be able to be removed unless they were carving out bone. I don’t think a surgeon would do that.

My surgeon said is it heals better with a bone disc implant and that makes sense to me. The fusion is really solid as good as any healed fracture. Bone quality is an issue for anything that relies on screws to hold it in place. Often there is a space inside an implant to allow bone to grow into it and they seed that with bone removed during surgery. My bone bank implant was like that too.

Since your levels are separate single levels, perhaps your surgeon could do them one at a time if you wanted to do it with no hardware. You’d have to ask about that or if you would be offered a no hardware option. Not all surgeons will do it, but before plates and other implants were invented, this is how they did cervical fusions.

What other questions would you ask your surgeon?