@dancermurphy Good for you for standing your ground about a spine steroid shot. I know some patients benefit from them, but if they are injected in the wrong place, they can cause serious problems. I won't do them again either after having had a bad experience with it. A lot of doctors push the injections. I as a patient would much rather fix a spine problem and recover from it. I only had 5 days of pain relief from my epidural before the pains started returning and I mapped them on a diagram as they did. I had spinal cord compression which is something that should be fixed sooner rather than later in order to avoid permanent injury to the spinal cord.

I do some pilates in physical therapy on a reformer and that has helped a lot rebuilding muscle in my arms and shoulders that was lost to atrophy from spinal cord compression. My physical therapist just measured my biceps last week and I gained an inch and a quarter in both arms. Are you having more problems since your disc replacement? We both had same level surgeries, so I'm curious what that is like to have an artificial disc. I wasn't a good candidate for it because of a bit of instability.

Anything you can do to relax is a benefit to heath. That might be different for each of us, and it;s interesting to hear about what others do. Thanks for sharing your experience.