‘No restrictions’ for cervical disk replacement patient

dairy cows at competitions

Amy Raber, 49, of Gridley, IL, has relied on her strength and physical abilities her entire life. Having grown up on a working farm, she fell in love with showing dairy cows at competitions around her home state. Getting her cows, which she compares lovingly to giant dogs, ready for show requires a great deal of preparation. That typically includes grooming the large animals using ten-pound cattle clippers and moving them in and out of their trailers and holding areas.

Today, Amy and her husband own a corn and soybean farm on which they and their family do all the work. In the spring, Amy’s role is to help with planting seed by continuously filling the planter and being on call to bring more seed to the fields. One bag of corn alone weighs sixty pounds. In the fall, Amy drives the auger cart during the combining process. During the process, the larger farm vehicle harvests the corn and soybean, then it is dumped into the auger cart behind which is up to 1,000 bushels of crop.

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.

 dairy cows at competitions  dairy cows at competitions

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 disk replacement (CDR), which he felt was more suited to her lifestyle than cervical fusion surgery.

Cervical disk replacement v. fusion

Dr. Phillips explained that CDR and the more traditional cervical fusion surgery are both surgical procedures that address painful disk 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 disk with an artificial one to preserve neck motion. The artificial disk 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.”

“I’m free to do whatever I want”

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.

If you would like to schedule an appointment with Dr. Frank Phillips to discuss your spine pain and how a cervical disk replacement procedure might help you, please call (877) 632-6637 or visit www.rushortho.com.

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