I’m trying to figure out what it might look like to make a more concerted effort to improve my neck and my nerve functions. I’m 62 and have degenerative disk disease, which in my neck is doing enough damage to result in slowly increasing disability with my hands and arms.
About 11 years ago my neck was bad enough that my surgeon fused C5, C6 and C7 in an anterior approach surgery with a fixation plate and two cadaver grafts. He said I had considerable nerve root damage on both sides, especially the left, and some spinal cord damage. I did get a nice improvement, especially regarding neck and upper back pain. But he also said my other disks didn’t look very good. He said that if artificial disks were further along at the time he would have also replaced my C4-C5 disk with one of those.
But I’ve had continuing deterioration. An MRI about 18 months ago showed that I do not have a single normal disk, and that I had had a disk herniation with massive pulp extrusion at the T1-T2 level (an unusual level for this, my right armpit felt like I was getting an electric shock for a week or so). The surgeon has described a gradual process of fusing additional levels of my neck with resulting loss of motion, indicating that we don’t want to be overeager to converge on this outcome.
There are also a few problems with my left arm and shoulder, and these issues seem to blend together somewhat. I have quadrilateral space syndrome on the left, which has been confirmed in two nerve conduction studies and in an MRI which found isolated atrophy of my teres minor muscle. I have a bit of thoracic outlet syndrome too (though many people have a bit of this). I had left rotator cuff surgery a few years ago because of unusual deposits of calcium in big solid chunks, as opposed to the pasty gritty deposits one more often sees. Long ago I had a nerve infection from my thumb up into my upper arm that took a long time to resolve. I’ve also had a wrist ganglion cyst removed, a thumbnail removed, and miscellaneous other things, all on the left. I don’t know enough about medicine to know whether any of these things interact with the nerve root damage.
The disability I have is worst on the left. I have intentional tremor, around 7 Hz, that is pronounced enough that several friends have noticed and asked about it. My left hand and arm are weak. I have dropped and broken drinking glasses and no longer even attempt to handle them with my left hand. Tasks such as separating sheets of paper, starting screw threads, pressing buttons on the phone or the alarm keypad, and untying knots have become so difficult with the left that I’ve learned not to even try. When a door has hinges on the left and opens toward me, pulling it with the left is quite difficult; I have to use my whole body rather than flexing my elbow, and get my foot into the door to pull it that way. Usually I use my right instead, even if it’s carrying something. I also frequently have a burning sensation on the back of my hand and wrist, like sunburn, which is similar to problems I had elsewhere when I had a lower back injury. Fortunately I can still type pretty well; I’m not sure why, except that I wind up doing it quite a lot so perhaps I’m learning to compensate somehow. And I can drive well enough. On the right I have some tremor, and it’s difficult to write, but the right is much better than the left.
I discussed this most recently with my family practice doctor during a routine checkup. He says that these things all are more or less to be expected, with the degree of nerve injury I’ve had with neck issues, and that I should anticipate them continuing to deteriorate.
My friend says “Pffft!” and dismisses what my current doctors say, and says the only way to approach problems like this is to find the best specialist I can in New York city, and wait however many months it takes to get an appointment with them. I find the prospect a bit daunting – for starters, it’s hours away – but I wonder if he’s right.
What say the Dopers? I don’t mean, how do I treat this. I mean, is finding different doctors in faraway places probably a good project idea? Or is there not really a basis to be starting a project like that? Is that the only right way to care for myself?
Thank you!