@solom174 Yes, I understand that you are recovering from surgery now. I do hope that it gets better for you in time. Please also understand that my comments are for the entire community. I didn't make assumptions about your experience and my comments are based on my surgical experience and observations. I don't know what surgery you had, but I do know that in general, spine surgery recovery is more difficult at the lower end of the spine than it is for a cervical surgery as told to me by my doctor because a patient is bearing most of their body weight on the lumbar spine. I had a cervical fusion of C5/C6 and my head turning ability is the same as it was before the fusion. I cannot touch my chin to my chest as before, but it is close. That is the compromise I spoke about because after surgery something will be different. I had one good choice I could make in having a fusion because I had bone spurs pressing into my spinal cord that were beginning to cause disability. I could have chosen an artificial disc, but I wasn't a great candidate for that and it had other risks I worried about. I could have chosen no surgery and my disability and pain would get worse.

Prior to surgery, I had pain all over my body from spinal cord compression, and that was all gone when I woke up from decompression surgery. The pain I experienced after surgery was related to the surgical path, and muscle spasms that are very common with spine patients as well as rehabbing from weakness after wearing a neck brace. Healing after invasive surgery is exhausting. Surgery also creates scar tissue that gets tight that causes pain, and I have worked with my physical therapist on this doing myofascial release to loosen this after the appropriate amount of healing. I periodically loosen it to prevent tightness that leads to muscle spasms. I remember that the tightness from scar tissue began at about 9 weeks and were annoying me a lot at the 3 month mark and I wasn't allowed to do any physical therapy on my neck at that point. I asked for a fusion without hardware, and the choice I made was to stay in a neck brace until fused which was just beginning at the 3 month mark. It was probably a month later when my therapist could start working on me again and I had a lot of pain pulling on my neck and headaches from neck spasms.

I asked my surgeon how I could try to avoid further spine surgery in the future and his answer was to maintain core strength and I do that. A strong core supports the spine and helps hold it with "proper" alignment or what is the best that I can do. A cervical fusion causes the spine to "dump forward" a bit because the bone disc spacer doesn't flex like a disc does so that affects the optimal neck curvature a little bit. Cervical vertebrae are pretty small, so a single level fusion wasn't very different for me than before the surgery. It has also been several years since my surgery, and generally it may take a year or longer after spine surgery for a full recovery. Every patent is different in what their surgery is and how they recover from it and how much pain they experience. The work I did with my physical therapist added to the success of the surgery because muscles were more pliable and easier to retract so it was less tension applied to my body during surgery which helped in healing. I also applied relaxation techniques to help manage pain and stopped taking pain medication that made me feel yucky. I saw it as healing pain at that point as a bridge to my recovery. I do think this helped.

I wrote this response before I found another of your posts, and I now see that you had a thoracic fusion of couple levels. From personal experience, I know an injury can change everything. My spine issues came from a whiplash injury years earlier and more recently, I was sidelined by a significant ankle fracture, and even though that has healed, and I've had the fixation hardware removed, I still have pain from the tendons and ligaments and cannot walk as far as I want. When my ankle gives out, I'm done and have to sit down. That of course comes with a realization that my physical abilities have changed, and I won't be able to hike as I thought I would be able to do after recovery. It's a personal loss and it takes a bit of time to adjust to that. I'm sorry your surgeon didn't set the right expectations for you.

Jennifer