I hope that you will recover well, and that that nerve will find out too (and your wife too, so you will get your bronze and trits back)
Sorry if it’s a bit gory for some of ya, I downsided it enough to take the edge off, look closer if you can handle it ok… There’s no stitches… glued, so that accounts for the shiny wet look.
And the rubber boots don’t come out of the Ti knobs til he’s ready to install a UI TK is working on and when we get the proper USB C cables in. 
Wish you a pleasant low moon mode then until you are cured (turbo was already guaranteed).
let me know when to bring my tennis racket…
Best wishes Dale for a speedy recovery! Thanks a lot MRsDNF for letting us know.
Thanks for the picture. Its a bit like left and right hand drive cars confusing me. The spine is at the rear but you get to it from the front. :person_facepalming:
Good idea on the racket Sav, I could cut those strong strings and rig a pulley systm to help me get in and out of bed! Carbon fiber racket would probably do, unluss we could rig the ti frame into the pulley system, whatcha think?
right Steve,lot’s o thing’s you don’ wanna be standing behind when they get fired up…
seriously though, they have to pull trachea/windpipe to one side, all blood supply lines to the other, keep nerve bundles from slippin in, all while dremmeling out the old bad bone and prep the face of whats left to bolt the slab of Ti to.
Not any kind of mod I’d want, that’s for sure!
You certainly would not want me messing around in there.
Ouch, good luck on a speedy recovery Dale! Too bad it wasn’t around Halloween, you could make a good Frankenstein with those nobs sticking out! 
I know right? I’d have made hollowed out Ti knobs and used some glue or something, would have been wicked if there’b a way to have a blue arc crossing my head from one to the other knob. 
Tryin to be chill, ya know, but man it’s a high energy task. Some scary schtuff…
I haven’t gotten confirmation yet from my surgeon but this is one of the type of Ti plates he may have used…
And another view, showing the freakishly agressive screws…
And here’s a different type, it’s my understanding that colors are used to establishe size and such so that a full kit of gear will easily show what goes with what for making positivie ID on the fly, as it were…
Then there’s this “King Cobra”, guess they go for big gun names in virtually everything huh? lol
Anyway, something like this, won’t stay all shiny and pretty of course as the bone will fuse to it and crawl all over it eventually encompassing the entire plate. Again, so I understand.
I’d love to see a video if they shot it, or at the very least the X-Ray taken to confirm placement. Will get there I supposed, I sent questions this morning.
No tritium inserts?
Wish you a speedy recovery I know it can be painful. I helped my mom recover from two back surgeries. One was a fuse another was removing a bone fragment. She needs neck surgery but is scared to let them do it. You’ll be back in no time. Doesn’t take to long.
On a side note if you could find some legit HGH human growth hormone it wkll cut recovery time drastically almost in half. I’ve had body builder friends use it with major surgeries when I was in the Marines and using “supplements” and the doctors can’t believe what they are seeing with the recovery rate. Not the cheapest thing anywhere from $110-200 a kit a kit would last a couple weeks and therapy dose. But the stuff works miracles. Besides speedy recoveries removes wrinkles and smooths skin all kinds of stuff. Even given to HIV/Aid patients to help improve there lives
Whoa Dale that’s some heavy duty surgery. I hope you are getting the rest you need so your body can recover and heal!
Your wife better be good at hiding stuff
I had totally forgotten this thread with all the meds and all. Sorry bout that!
Neck is doing great, 3 months in and it’s fused well already, no limits according to the Dr. He says he’s never seen the bones fuse so fast.
The arm, different story. Had a Cortisone shot last week, been going to Physical Therapy and am getting use of the arm back pretty well, managing the pain with a single drug and am close to having full range of motion… my physical therapist gets mad at me for pushing too hard, but I want the arm working so I can Make Things! I work hard on it at home, think she’s gonna be proud of me, only to have her find new ways to torture the spot problem. Today was one of those, left with dried tears on my face after laughing through the pain. (yeah, for some strange reason I laugh hysterically when I hurt the worst. Go figure. Other PT’s in the workout area were trippin on me today…. “You okay? Are you laughing or crying? ” Both. lol
Rest assured, I’m modding lights anyway. 
Planning a new mod for my big TR-J20 that’s going to take some machining, hoping for in excess of 20,000 lumens…. Go big or go home!
Dale a buddy of mine was undergoing a knee replacement surgery and the nurse let him get just a little loopy before they put him out completely. She then took out a dry erase marker that looks just like a permanent marker. She then drew a big circle around his GOOD knee and marked the bad one with an X. My friend nearly filled his pants because he is one of these guys that absolutely don’t trust doctors and only will allow being sedated to unconsciousness in only the most dire circumstances. Turns out his wife had got together with the operating room nurse and cooked up the whole scheme. They ended up cleaning both of knee marks off and doing the preparatory pre surgery on the correct knee. To this day we give him crap about his reactions. I guess you had better be nice to your wife because as a nurse she could really figure out a way to get you back for sure. I am glad that surgery has been successful for you, any nerve pain that originates in pressure in spinal column is no joke for sure. You must have had a good surgeon as complex as your procedure was. Keep up the good work in physical therapy, the more the pain, the better the gain!
I reckon it’d been pretty difficult to mark my wrong neck. :confounded:
I’ve been amazed at how little pain or discomfort my neck has been, it’s never been bad at all. The nerve pain to my arm was always the major issue and I never had anything more than what felt like a mild sore throat to deal with, nothing I’d have even taken aspirin for.
The real concern was one of spasms from the conversion disorder, and while I’ve had a couple of scares it was managed by the meds before it really got started so in the end, I’ve been some 5 months without spasms, a major relief in and of itself.
Best of surgeons, and he’s leaving our Hospital to go to SanAntonio and open a Spine Clinic there. Sad to see him go, for the work he’s capable of… he’s not the best at communications but his work is excellent.
My Ti plate, showing some bone growth on top of the plate and screws. Within the year, the entire thing will be covered in bone and be an integral part of me. Titanium is SOOO cool!
Showing from the side, the 6 Ti screws anchoring the plate to my spine. There is a small cage in between the vertebrate to support bone growth, implanted with some of my own bone from the procedure. At this time it’s fused, my neck is now stable.
So you see Steve, the spine is the core of the neck, not in the back really at all…. the back of the spine has large bony protrusions reminiscent of dinosaur backbones. The Dr. told me that if my spasms were to wreck the surgery he’d have to go in from the back and it would be a much more difficult procedure. I’m glad it all went well and I made it to fusion.
I actually identified the make of the plate from the X-Ray, contacted the maker and they sent me a very detailed PDF file showing all their offerings and the tools used in the process. I used their dimensions as well as the X-Ray photo to recreate the plate myself. I used the lathe to “mill” the lowered centered portion and cut out the base shape, then used a drill press to drill all the holes. The smaller holes offset are for locking screws. The “windows” are for viewing the bone growth in the X-Ray and I had to enlarge a drilled hole with a file by hand. Ultimately, showing this to my Dr. he thought I was giving it to him! He stuck it on his car key chain and seemed quite pleased to get it so I let it go…. funny how it worked out.
He chose this particular plate because it’s geared for adding a plate to either end, for a possible surgery on the next vertebrate, mine are bad above the areas he worked on and could need future attention. He did C5-C6-C7. I have issues at C3 and C4 as well. Nice huh?
In looking at all this I think I saw an estimated cost of the CNC machined plate at around $650. That piece of Commercially Pure Ti cost me a whopping $3.47! The entire surgery, 3 1/2 hours, cost $100,800! With insurance from this hospital (my wife is an employee) I have a total cost of around $3000. Thank God for Insurance!