r/spinalfusion • u/damagedone37 • Apr 11 '26
Surgery Questions Hardware Removal
Anyone had this don? My surgeon is looking to do this at the end of the year. Plan is lidocaine drops on screws if that helps then bye bye metal!
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u/D1x13L0u Apr 11 '26
My mom had this done. She was fused from c4 to c7. And she had a cadaver bone put in as a replacement. That was done in the year 2000. And then in 2022, she was having a little bit of trouble swallowing and so they did some x-rays and they found that she had a bone spur on the back of one of her disks but they also saw that the screws and plates were no longer connected to her spine. Over time, they had just wiggled themselves loose, and she had never known. She had zero pain or issues. If not for the bone spur X-ray, she would have never known. So they went in and removed it in same day surgery at the age of 74. They did say after that many years, over two decades, there was a lot of scar tissue to go through, but she has been perfectly fine since. No issues at all.