Okay, I've just had a trip to the Surgeon's Office, and he was very nice, and I have surgery set for October 20th at 7:30am to have my spine fused.

Doesn't that just sound ducky?

Basically, what he'll do is go in through my neck with a microscope, shove my esophagus and carotid artery off to one side, scrape out the fluid between 2 of my discs (numbers 5 & 6), then put in a shim that'll fuse to the discs and hold them steady, helped along by a titanium plate and some pins. He said the recovery period will be something like 3 - 4 weeks. Might be less, might be more. And the liklihood of all the scraping and shimming and fusing actually doing any good is about 75%.

I get itchy just thinking about it.