Cannot sleep/sit - Burning pain down neck and upper back (had surgery)

Hello spine warriors!

I want to preface this with that I am a 41M and had a two-level cervical disc replacement 9 weeks ago to address long term cervical herniations which I thought was causing my issues but now I'm desperately looking to see if I can get some relief and some kind quality of life back.

My quality of life is really diminished as I currently cannot really lean my head back without all sorts of very odd tingling sensations occurring around my face and neck after a short period of time when I sit and if I lay down, I eventually get burning pain all down my neck and upper back which constantly wakes me up all night.

Pain management hasn't been too helpful as meds aren't working for relief. I'm just looking for what could still possibly be driving this or what I can do to get some relief and sleep/work again.

Every day I wake up with the burning agony still and my mental health is declining.

I put together a timeline of my issue:

October 2024:
While working out in my home gym, I noticed that I was getting nerve irritation in my right shoulder/bicep/forearm. I figured it had something to do with my shoulder, so I took some time off from working out.

Late December 2024:
I started to experience radiating nerve pain laterally across my upper back into my shoulders. Was very difficult to deal with so I went to the local Ortho clinic and they x-rayed my right shoulder which came back negative. They sent me home with some medications and a script for PT.

January 2025:
I began going to PT, 3x a week. They had me doing the standard upper back/posture exercises like prone Ys, Is, some Lat pulldowns, and bunch of thoracic stretches. I was waking up at night constantly with neck pain, so I set out to buy a new mattress and pillow. Also, my upper back and traps were extremely tight during this time.

February 2025:
Finally bought a new medium firm mattress which is seemingly helping my back (lower back too) but now I have a new issue where my hands (pinky and hands finger) were falling asleep more times than not. I guess the soft mattress may have been hiding some of the issues and my body is adjusting to the firmer surface. I also began shopping around for a pillow (went through many pillows). Each pillow I tried I would also wake up with neck pain in the middle of the night until I finally found a cervical pillow (Groove pillow) that allowed me to sleep some through the night.

March 2025:
I didn't make much progress going to PT, so I decided to go book an appointment with an Ortho doctor who specializes in neck/back. They x-rayed my cervical spine which was negative and sent me home with more medications and a script for an MRI.

MRI results came back with the following findings:

C5-6: Broad-based left paracentral/foraminal disc herniation is noted with an annular fissure. This minimally indents the spinal cord. No spinal cord signal abnormality seen. There is mild left neural foraminal stenosis.

C6-7: Broad-based right paracentral/foraminal disc herniation is noted with an annular fissure. This very mildly indents the spinal cord. No spinal cord signal abnormality seen. There is very mild right neural foraminal stenosis.

April 2025:

After showing my PT my MRI results and being blown off, I switched PT providers to someone more experienced. I also noticed that my upper back pain and tightness was dissipating upon waking up but now I was getting a deep ache in the sides of my neck which would slowly sink down into my upper back after about 30 minutes. I could feel the nerves tingling in my traps as this occurs.

April 2025 to June 2025:

I continued going to PT who started me on cervical traction, some manual therapy (central PAs on my neck), massages, and TENS therapy. There was seemingly slight improvement over this time but was not anything significant. My head would continue to ache each morning I get up out of bed, but the upper back tightness was going away much quicker. I explained this to my PT, and they thought it was positive because my symptoms seemingly were centralizing.

July 2025:
I thought I was progressing in PT, so we added supine chin tucks and a new banded exercises to target my serratus muscle.

Unfortunately, all hell broke. After mowing the lawn and doing some of my PT exercises. I felt a spasm in my left shoulder blade area, and it tightened up, so I decided to just ice and heat for the day. I laid off the PT exercises for a few days and went back to my PT to explain what happened. They thought I overloaded my serratus muscle which was a sign of weakness and did some more manual therapy on me along with the standard heat and TENS.

However, a few nights later I woke up in the middle of the night with the most intense burning nerve pain in the back of neck. It radiates down to my upper back and a little into both shoulders. The pain does let up a little during the day (heat and ice constantly) but when I fall asleep on my back, the intense burning in my neck and other areas comes roaring back after a little while.

August 2025:

The pain wasn't going away so that's when I decided to go to a spine institute for more help. We tried a cervical ESI but that wasn't of any help and along with some opioid medications.

We did a repeat MRI showed that I still had the herniations at C5-C7, so I decided to surgery as I couldn't function anymore. I wasn't sleeping, working, or do much of anything. I opted for a disc replacement over fusion as my CT scan was pretty clean from my bone structure.

Thanks for taking the time to read and providing any input.