@justclintdavis Hello and welcome to Connect. You are correct that sciatica can be caused by spinal cord compression in the neck. I am a cervical fusion patient and prior to surgery, I had pain all over my body that was being caused by spinal cord compression. Part of that was sciatica, and my pain would change locations when I changed neck positions. Having surgery that decompressed my spinal cord fixed all of that. I found literature that sometimes sciatica is the symptom that leads to the discovery of spinal cord compression. I will share some literature here and you may want to discuss this with your surgeon in case you want to change course and address the issues in the cervical spine. Many surgeons miss this and all the surgeons I saw before coming to Mayo also missed it. All of these articles describe phenomenon called "funicular pain" and there is no diagnostic test for it except that decompression surgery fixes it which proves the diagnosis.

I have not had a spinal cord simulator and don't need one because my c5/c6 fusion took care of all the symptoms. If your surgeon does not want to consider this as a possible diagnosis, you will need to get another opinion and put this literature on the table at the start. I found myself in that position of having been dismissed by a surgeon, and then finding this, and no doctors who knew me would help me address it with the surgeon who missed it. I suggest asking it as a question by asking if your case is like these cases in literature that you found. Let the doctor take the information and get back to you after having time to look at it and think about it. You don't want to put him on the spot and embarrass him if he has not heard of this. They must find a relationship between the imaging and your symptoms to justify surgery and the spinal simulator is because you have pain with an unknown source. I had my surgery at Mayo and the surgeon was familiar with this type of symptom.

Good luck in your quest!

Jennifer