[rosedee]

Hi Mark and thanks for your post. The information you have gained about facet repairs and ADR revision from your talks with doctors is very useful to hear about.

I think one of the hardest things in trying to reach decisions is that invariably each doctor you see has at least a slightly different stance/emphasis on your situation. As you know, 4 different surgeons each agreed that L3/4 was my main pain generator (in all probability) and that ADR was an/the appropriate treatment. Of these, I had confidence in the opinion of 3 of them, each of whom was very experienced and well-regarded. And yet there were also differences in their opinions about my overall back problems. The view that the more docs you see the more opinions you get still holds true. The other side is that while I value the opinion of each of these doctors still, I have certain reservations about each of them now, for different reasons.

In addition, now that diagnostic injections using local anaesthetic are known to be unreliable for me, I am always going to be missing important data for decision-making. This will, then, increase my likelihood of being one of the "unlucky ones".

In relation to the facet replacement, my thinking currently is that I would be mad to go with it at the present time - not only is it to soon for there to be meaningful outcome data, but my back is nothing like those discrete problems that the trials are focussing on. Do I really want to be a guinea pig?

On the other hand................... I can't bring myself to have another fusion in the forseeable future......... perhaps a year's sabatical is the answer ........ but what if......... back and forth and round and round I go!