Hi, Nance. I may be proving to be a bit of a head-scratcher to my doctors. I have no troubling symptoms in my extremities. My only complaint is my weird wobbly gait. Although I've not fallen, I'm always afraid I'm about to. I have to be extra-cautious going about. As you must have read in one of my earlier posts, I've been diagnosed with C5-C7 stenosis, but with only minimal (my doctor calls it "borderline") intrusion on my spinal column and no direct compression of the cord itself. He's advised I stick with PT, at least for six months, then get a fresh MRI and go back to talk to him. Your situation also sounds like a bit of a head-scratcher: extreme burning in your hands and arms upon lying down, but none of that when you're upright. To my untrained mind, that does sound like a puzzler. Let's see what Jennifer has to say. I've come to have high respect for Jennifer's knowledge of this whole stenosis business. And, Nance, I'm so glad you've found us! I look forward to our conversations. ––Ray

@amberrose @ray666 Hello Nance and Ray. The term is actually spondylolisthesis, but I was trying to use common language that would make sense. Think of it like this. You have a string with large beads on it. The string is the spinal cord and each bead is a vertebra. If you pull on a bead to offset it, it pulls on the string of you pull it hard enough. If a spinal disc is allowing movement of the vertebrae in any forward, back or sideways direction, that is called listhesis. My reports stated I had retrolisthesis which is (backward movement) of C5 over C6. It meant that when I bent my neck, my C5 vertebra was sliding backward past C6 by 2 millimeters, so my vertebrae were not stacked perfectly in line with each other. Your spine changes position when you lay down, and if you have spondylolisthesis, it can cause spinal nerves to get compressed if the vertebrae are moving out of alignment. The spinal nerve exit the spine between the vertebrae. If that is something that you can change and reproduce the results with a change in position, make sure you explain that to your doctor. Sometimes spine surgeons take a standing full body X-ray of the spine for this reason, to show if the vertebrae are slipping past each other which can be common with spinal deformity cases. The standing vs laying down images can show very different alignment.