@larryk1 Oh I understand what it is to be worried about what damage has happened and what the maximum recovery will be after spine surgery. At 5 weeks post-op, it is still very early in your recovery. Did your surgeon order nerve conduction and EMG studies prior to your surgery? Those tests would tell them if nerve signals are being sent properly and correctly received by the muscles. That would be done to rule out a "differential diagnosis" of something else that causes the same symptoms like ALS or MS. MS can show evidence on an MRI.

I don't know anyone with ALS, but I did speak with a couple in a waiting area at Mayo when I was there and the husband had ALS. I could see random spontaneous muscle contractions in his arm and that was going on all the time as he had no control over it. There were small muscles jumping all over the place. With cervical myelopathy (which I had), I did have some jumping muscles in my leg, but it was in specific places that repeated, and if I changed the position of my head and neck which changed where the spinal cord was being contacted by the bone spurs in the central canal, it changed what happened and the muscle contractions would stop or the pain would change to a different place. I had a ruptured disc with an osteophyte complex at C5/C6. I was getting pain all over my body from this which is called funicular pain and that seemed to be pretty random, but it had a pattern and I was tracking it on diagrams I was drawing. In comparison, when nerves are compressed in the foramen (space between vertebrae where nerves exit), the nerve pain and dysfunction is very specific to that nerve and affects a specific body part.

5 weeks after surgery is still early, and my guess would be that your surgeon wants to know if any hardware or implants have been displaced and to check the spinal alignment so he/she knows if anything has physically changed since your surgery. You may be affected by inflammation form he surgery itself.

Would you share what you find out after your MRI?