@mikena
Thank you so much for sharing this — I’m really sorry you’re dealing with it, but I truly appreciate you responding. It’s validating to hear from someone with such similar symptoms who was diagnosed with cervical myelopathy.

I did have an initial surgical consult and was told it wasn’t considered “dangerous” yet, but my MRI shows multilevel degeneration with central canal narrowing, loss of CSF around the cord, and cord crowding/flattening. My symptoms have continued to progress, which is why being steered toward injections has made me uneasy.

From what I’ve been reading, cervical myelopathy is often missed or underdiagnosed early on, with many patients initially treated for radiculopathy or muscle issues before cord involvement is recognized.

If you don’t mind sharing — what helped lead to your myelopathy diagnosis? Were there specific exam findings or MRI details that made the difference?

Wishing you the best with your upcoming appointments, and thank you again for speaking up.

@mikena Do you have a list of questions ready for your appointments? It's good that you are getting 2 opinions. The goal in a situation like this is to take pressure off the spinal cord and also to prevent further damage from compression. I would suspect that you may be having a lot of symptoms related to this. I had spinal cord compression in my neck at one level and when I woke up from my spine surgery, all of that presurgical pain was gone. I had of course the pain from the incision and surgical path, but that was not as bad as I had imagined it to be.