Pain: Not from a day’s work

Seven years ago, at just age 42, Amy began to experience nagging pain in her neck and shoulders. She assumed it was all in a day’s work and frequently got massages which provided some relief. A few years later, the pain worsened, and she sought help from local health care providers. As part of the process, a pain physician ordered an MRI which showed extensive arthritis in the disks in her cervical spine (neck). He recommended cortisone shots, which she did every three months for three years with varying degrees of success.

“It felt so defeated at my age,” she explains. “The pain took over my life and I couldn’t get enough Tylenol and Advil. I really had lost interest in my life.”

Her next recourse was an epidural injection in her neck which worked briefly but then the pain worsened. Her shoulder pain increased, and her right had went numb, alternating with pain that felt like a ‘sledgehammer hitting her hands.’  The next symptom was an ‘electric shock’ feeling down her right arm.

“It was brutal,” she says. “It was like holding onto an electric fence.”

Following that, she lost all grip strength to open a jar or doorknob or hold a cow’s rein.

Time to seek another solution

Her local physician agreed that injections were no longer working and encouraged her to seek other specialists, like a rheumatologist, to find the underlying cause of her pain and how to treat it. It was in a rheumatologist’s office in Chicago that her life changed.

“She looked at my MRI, saw the disk degeneration in my neck, and immediately said, ‘you need spinal surgery,’” she explains. “She recommended Dr. Frank Phillips, a minimally invasive spine surgeon at Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush in Chicago, and I literally called him on my way home.”

Amy took the next available appointment and while Dr. Phillips was viewing her imaging, he saw Amy’s severe arthritis between two vertebrae in her cervical spine between levels C5 and C7. He took time to learn about her life, her symptoms, and the level of activity she wanted to return to. He referred to her symptoms as ‘textbook’ spinal disk degeneration and explained that she was a perfect candidate for cervical disc replacement (CDR), which he felt was more suited to her lifestyle than cervical fusion surgery.

Cervical disc replacement vs. fusion

Dr. Phillips explained that CDR and the more traditional cervical fusion surgery are both surgical procedures that address painful disc degeneration in the neck. Both can help relieve neck and associated pain in other parts of the body, but they differ in how they treat the spine and more importantly, how they can provide post-surgery range of motion in the neck. 

In a CDR procedure, a specially trained spine surgeon replaces a damaged disc with an artificial one to preserve neck motion. The artificial disc allows the joint to mimic the original, healthy joint, allowing the spine to bend, flex, and rotate almost completely normally. This procedure, typically done on an outpatient basis, also helps patients return to daily activities more quickly. 

In a cervical fusion procedure, the surgeon fuses two or more vertebrae together with a bone graft, eliminating the cushion in between, which limits movement but stabilizes the spine and eliminates pain. 

Amy liked the proposed reduced recovery time and better range of motion outcome with a CDR procedure, so she set a date to undergo surgery at the Gold Coast Surgicenter in Chicago.

When she awoke from surgery, her pain was gone. “I went from feeling like there were ice picks in my shoulder to nothing,” she says. She also had no shocks up her arm or pain and numbness in her hands. “I was in shock and disbelief. And I loved that I went home the same day as surgery.”

Back to living 

At home, her family noticed a difference in her immediately. “My kids and husband told me that I seemed happier and was more carefree and relaxed,” she says. “That’s because I went from ‘how can I keep living like this?’ to ‘now I’m free to do whatever I want physically,” Amy explains.

This past summer, she participated in the Illinois State Fair cattle show and was able to do everything needed to show her cows. Thanks to her CDR procedure, she has come a long way from not being able to even care for them.

“It’s such a good feeling!” she explains.