We made the Monday trip to Corpus for the three-week follow-up with the surgeon. He said I’m doing awesome. I think that was the technical term he used; that’s what I heard anyway. The staples are now out, so I guess we’ll need a newer nickname than zipper neck.
Remember how my neck looked before?
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I sent out an x-ray of it.
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This scrolling down thing is your chance to escape before the graphic x-rays show up, if you don’t want to see them.
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It looked like this.
Lots of hardware.
Almost all the old hardware came out. There were two broken-off screws that got left in. They put in two new bone grafts, then they put twice as much hardware back in. Now it looks like this; screws, plates, and rods:
They took this while the staples were still in the back of my neck. Looks like they had a long way to go to get from there to my spine.
Anyway, now I’m more hardware than neck. They’ve got me screwed down so tight, these fusions should take though. We’ll know in about two more months. Six months for sure. Or twelve.
From the front it looks like this.
The plates and screws in the middle are on the front. The outside rods and screws are on the back. You can see the neck staples behind them.
Here is the staple collection after.
That’s the staple puller. It distorts and pulls them at the same time.
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