[russ]

Bill will most certainly have better advice, but I have a couple of things to mention. First, I don't think it was an actual herniation if it is now back in place as you say. Perhaps a bulge? A herniated disc in that location would more than likely require surgery because ruptures don't just heal.

While the disc itself doesn't heal (discs aren't well vascularized), the herniated material can retract over time and the inflammation surrounding the nerve will abate. From what I've read, it's the inflammation around the nerve rather than the actual compression of the nerve which results in symptoms. About 80-90% of cervical disc herniations can be effectively managed without surgery. The remainder are stubborn.

Just goes to show that those butchers are all too eager to get their scalpels in us!

I might agree with you if I were in certain parts of the US, but the poster is from the province of New Brunswick. In most parts of Canada, access to operating time is sufficiently limited that I would argue that many surgeons in Canada aren't aggressive enough, i.e., they only operate on the worst cases.

If you had an actual herniation, the recovery isn't as long as you think. All they do is fuse the vertebrae together, and they don't even have to cut any muscle to get to it. They go in from the front of your neck so all they have to do is move stuff out of the way and they can get clear access to your spine. If that is what you wind up doing eventually, take the doner bone and DON'T let them take bone from your hip. That is usually why those surgeries take so long to recover from. The neck incision is superficial.

There are newer techniques which don't require fusion, actually. Some people , unfortunately, have sufficiently bad degenerative disc disease that anything short of fusion won't help very much.