Hi Jennifer, thanks for your further elaboration. I appreciate your empathy and I am sorry that you cannot engage in the same degree of physical activity as before either. It seems to me that the time is ripe to move forward with surgial technique for this very reason, we should not have people have to "compromise" by taking on new disability that they did not have in the first place - the surgeon views these things as "trade-offs" but I do not think it is appropriate to aspire to this kind of trade-off and think we can do better if there is a will to figure this out like they have for traumatic spial cord injury. I know this surgical intervention technique is old because I read about its history in Dr. Edward Benzel's book on spine biomechanics. There have been developments around the surgical intervention techniques in imaging (with advent of MRI, CT scan, microscope, etc.) that facilitate surgery but the fundamental surgical procedures in spine are quite staid and need innovation to also prevent disabling the patient post-surgery yet proclaiming the surgery is technically a success.