Cervical Disc Fusion Surgery for Serious Neck Injuries Resulting from Rear End Auto Accidents

Most neck pain is due to degenerative changes that occur in the intervertebral discs of the cervical spine and the joints between each vertebra. The vast majority of people who have this sort of degenerative condition may never require any type of operation. However, if there has been aggravation as the result of injuries in an accident you may need an anterior cervical fusion to resolve back or neck pain. If you feel like you have been injured in an accident and can’t get the settlement you need, please Contact Us for a FREE Consultation.

Hi, this is Tim Williams with Dwyer Williams Potter Attorneys. I’m the lead litigation attorney here at the firm and also a partner. I’d like to talk about cervical fusion surgery.

So when a person has a disk bulge or herniation that is causing symptoms, and the doctors can’t get those symptoms to go away with conservative treatment, then one of their only options is what is called disk fusion or cervical fusion. Essentially, they go in there and they take the problematic disk out, and they put in what is called an allograft strut in, which is a piece of bone, and then they put a plate on it and allow the bone there to fuse. This is important because if left untreated the condition would become worse and it can even result in paralysis.

So we can see at the top of the diagram this is a cervical surgical diskectomy and fusion. Diskectomy simply means we’re taking the disk out, and fusion means they’re fusing the two levels of bone. Here we see the doctor cutting the throat in the front. Some people might find this suspicious because we know the spine is in the back. However, the doctors rarely approach from the back because of all the muscles in the back of the spine; whereas the front of the spine there’s hardly any muscles at all. So what they do is they cut, as we see here, the front of the throat. They move the esophagus and airway out of the way and wallah there’s the disk.

In this picture we see the skin retracted and the C5 and C6 vertebrae are labeled. C5 simply means cervical No. 5 and C6 means cervical No. 6. So we’re actually looking at a neck surgery in this photograph. Now, the doctor has taken what is called a rongeur and a scalpel and he’s cutting away the disk, and the rongeur is like pinchers and they’re actually grabbing the disk and pulling bits and pieces of it out. And then we look on the smaller photograph there, and we see a side view where he’s doing the same thing, and he’s actually taking the disk and cutting it away from the bone and pulling it out to remove the disk and remove the problem area.

In here we see the area where the disk has been removed, and the doctor is placing what is called an allograft. An allograft simply means a piece of bone. Sometimes it is harvested from a hip and sometimes it is harvested from a cadaver. And you also see a drill. The reason the doctor uses the drill is to rough up the area of the bone to promote healing and fusion. So the drill is used to remove the area of the bone both above and below the area where the allograft is going to be inserted. These are the two bones between which allograft has been placed, and we can see the allograft between those two levels.

Now, what is on top is simply a plate. That’s a metal plate, usually titanium, and screws. And so what the doctor does is he puts the plate on the bones and he screws it into place, and this will keep that area fused temporarily while the bones actually heal, and turns what used to be two levels into one level. In other words, it used to be two bones with a disk in between and now those two bones are going to fuse so the allograft is going to be essentially one big bone.

After the surgery the doctor will continue to monitor the patient for up to a year, as it takes usually that long for a fusion to fully occur, after which time the patient will be off on their way.

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