I was reading about how phil collins got neck surgery and he can no longer play the drums, sign his name on paper, or even use the bathroom unassisted. How common is this sort of thing? Tons of WWE wrestlers have had neck surgery and came back in a year or less to wrestle again. To name a few: Kurt Angle, Chris Benoit, Edge, Lita, Gregory Helms, Bob Holly,Test, Rhyno, Steve Austin, Matt and Jeff Hardy. All of those wrestlers were operated on by Dr Lloyd Youngblood.
Not all neck surgeries are the same.
These were all disk fusions.
All disk fusions are not the same.
Necks, spinal cords, and nerves are incredibly complex. There are many differing modes of injury - Phil Collins destroyed his vertebrae from years of drumming while most wrestlers likely had collision or compression fractures. They also are trained and typically well muscled athletes, while Phil is a fairly dumpy, middle-aged musician. While wrestling is quite athletic, they don’t necessarily need the fine motor control that a drummer needs. So problems that the wrestlers could work around may be major blockers for a musician.
To sum up, there are too many variables to say that any type of disk fusion surgery should have the same outcomes. That’s without getting into complications from the surgery, degenerative diseases, or poorly performed operations. No surgery can guarantee a specific outcome.
I had to give up golf after my neck surgery. I also had to scale back my archery. I don’t think these things are due to the surgery as much as the injury that required surgery.
Perhaps OP could put Phil Collins in touch with the good Dr. Lloyd Youngblood?
I just did a bit of Googling now as I was unaware of Phil Collins’ predicament. I have no idea if he was being treated by a neurosurgeon or an orthopedic surgeon, and I don’t know what kind of surgery was being attempted, but the surgery he had back in 2009 went badly, resulting in nerves being severed. There’s very little to be done to repair that.
Surgical misadventures like that are thankfully, not common, but when they do happen, they can be devastating.
We can play as amateur neurosurgeons all we want, but without knowing the specifics of Phil’s original problem (I can only assume a herniated cervical disk) and what treatment was planned, and what actually happened on the table, it’s all guessing.
As for Dr. Youngblood, he appears to be a competent and not particularly distinguished surgeon who does spinal fusions. There are many more surgical options available now such as microdiskectomy and disk replacement, but not all doctors have been trained in these techniques.