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I agree with you whole heartily. My first neck c3-c5 was done over 20 years ago. I heard great things about the doc I used. He had many published articles and even wrote a boo. In fact a year prior he fused my lumbar ant L4-5 and I had great results. So I went with the same surgeon.
Bad mistake, his specialty was lumbar spines, not neck. And he was an arrogant ass who acted like it was no big deal. We’ll 22 years later the screws became loose, causing horrible bone and soft tissue infections with multiple bone cysts. Eventually the plates became loose too and the whole titanium mess fell into my throat and sliced my esophagus.
Then to top it off my primary care doctor was an even bigger idiot. I complained about this area for over a year, possibly more. And he kept telling me to go to physical therapy, which probably would have killed me. I asked for an mri the entire time and he said my insurance would not pay for it unless I went to PT. That I found out is a lie. Please don’t listen to that as I did.
At the first hospital ER I went to the did exploratory surgery and removed the hardware from my neck. They couldn’t fix the tear in my esophagus and told me I may never swallow again. A week later a different ENT looked in on me and cut open my incisions to find more infections.
Thank god for this women! She said you need to get out of here and proceeded to have me transferred to UC Davis hospital under the leadership of the head thoracic surgeon there. He was a very intense, intelligent gentleman who gathered a team of the top doctors there. 3 more surgeries later they decided to reconstruct my neck using a graph called a flap from my thigh. I’m told there are only a handful of surgeons in the country who do this surgery. It took 10 hours in the OR. They actually connect blood vessels to the graph to reconstruct my neck.
So now I’ve lost 50% of the bone in my neck. I’m looking at a final surgery to stabilize my neck from C2 to T2..
So many things happened that I should of caught along the way. The idiot surgeon was not a quality neck surgeon, even though he was a good low back surgeon. All the surgeons from the past year agreed on one thing. That it was the negligence or the original surgeon that caused these problems. And would you believe I had 3 opinions. Pay attention to social media and what people say about doctors and surgeons. I didn’t have that option 22 years ago.
Take matters into your own hand and research as much as possible. Credentials, specialties AND word from patients on social media.
I notice no one really mentioned doctors names here so I won’t but he was a Sacramento based surgeon wh has moved on to Beverly Hills LOL! His initials are PXM.
Replies to "I agree with you whole heartily. My first neck c3-c5 was done over 20 years ago...."
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@sandyzc You do have an extensive story. I know spine surgery has improved a lot in the last 20 years too. I am sorry you've had to go through all of this. I also chose not to name the surgeons who in my case refused to help me because they misunderstood my symptoms and even though they all understood the imaging, they missed the real diagnosis. Any of them could have helped me, but it took 2 years before I gave up after 5 surgeons passed on me, and I contacted a surgeon at Mayo. I had great results and am doing very well with my one fused level. I asked to do this surgery without hardware because I was worried about allergic immune responses to metals and foreign substances in my body, so I had only a natural donor bone graft and healed very nicely. We can't use this forum to bash doctors, but being honest about your patient history is important to educate others, so withholding names is a good way to do that. Without naming them, I can be comfortable in being completely honest about my experience. I have read that doctors do look for bad reviews online and try to have them removed.
I am so glad you are now in the care of expert specialists. There was no internet for research 20 years ago, but now we have that advantage. When I chose my surgeon at Mayo, I looked at his area of interest, the papers he authored and coauthored, his education and credentials that included a full undergraduate scholarship, and being awarded accolades for his research papers at spine conferences. He was well respected by his peers, had been trained at Mayo in Neurosurgery, then hired and retained by Mayo and teaches in the neurosurgery 7 year training program. That all said to me that he was at the top of his game and I knew when I met him at a consult that he was very intelligent and he answered my questions well. I had watched so many videos from spine conferences and presentations at that point, that I knew he was giving me good answers for the current trends in spine surgery.
When do you expect to have your next stabilizing neck surgery? You had asked about my recovery time, and I was able to just take my time and sleep a lot. Because I had no hardware, I was in a neck brace around the clock until it began to fuse which was 3 months, and that was my own choice. I didn't worry about it or feel claustrophobic. It was worth it to keep metal off my spine. After that, there is weakness from muscle atrophy, so I did physical therapy for awhile after that, maybe 6 months. At 3 months when I took off the neck brace, I was so exhausted just holding up my head. You are suppose to wean out of it slowly. I did feel pretty good 6 months after my spine surgery. It really takes about a year for a fusion to heal and to reach maximum recovery after surgery, maybe even longer. The bone growth continues for a long time to fill in and solidify the new vertebrae. I still stretch out skin that gets tight where the incision was periodically and it's been several years.
I am glad your current doctors have been honest with you about the negligence of the original surgeon. At least you have that validation. I do feel we have to ask a lot of questions and make sure we completely understand why a proposed surgery should work, and understand all the complications and risks we take on in going forward. There are statistics for all of that, and each surgeon has his specific statistics of successful surgeries, which may not mean exactly the same thing to a patient who may still have pain after a successful surgery. You need a compassionate doctor who really wants to help because he loves his job. For me, there is no room for arrogance in a doctor patient relationship; I will just move on and find someone better. It's like a job interview, and I get to hire the most qualified doctor to fix my problem. To me arrogance implies that the doctor thinks I'm just wasting their time or not smart enough to understand. I will ask the detailed questions about how and why it works or doesn't work and how many other ways there are to solve the problem, and what makes me a good or not so good candidate. We as patients have to advocate for ourselves and have the right to make the decision about what we authorize when we sign a consent form. It took seeing 6 different surgeons before I fond a good one that I could trust, and my gut feeling was right about him.