@flyingmartini1 Hello and welcome to Connect. I think I can answer your question about spinal titanium plates. Plates are put on the front of the spine vertebral bodies to add stability while the fusion is healing and bonding bones together. The surface that will be fused in fusion surgrgery is where they take out a bad disc. The surfaces that abut the disc are called the end plates of the vertebral body and those surfaces are ground to a flat surface and fused by putting in spacer. In my case, the spacer was a disc of donor bone, but they also use manufactured cages for this. The surgeon used the bone removed by grinding the surface and bone spur removal to seed bone cells into the spacer disc which has a space inside it for this. The bone disc spacer from a donor source is the mineral matrix deposited by the bone cells, but all of the cells have been removed and the matrix is sterilized.

If another fusion is done adjacent to an existing fusion, the surgeon may remove the plate on the front of the spine from the prior surgery and attach an appropriate plate. In my case, I asked for no hardware, and my surgeon did a single level fusion with only a bone spacer. I stayed in a neck brace for 3 months until the fusion process began to stabilize.

A laminectomy is where they enlarge the opening of the spinal canal by making cuts in the bone and raising it up and attaching some hardware to hold it in place. It's like raising the roof on a home to make space for a second floor. A diskectomy is when the bad disc is removed.

Are you looking at another fusion surgery or considering a laminectomy?