mild spinal cord injury?

Hi bostonfern and  To the forum. I'm a bit concerned about what you posted, not being a medical person I can't give advice except for go to a spinal doctor as soon as you can, your symptoms would certinally worry me. You can not afford to just let any doctor muck around with you, see a specialist ASAP. Please don't delay.

Thank you both for your quick reply. I live in Silicon Valley. Is there a recommendation of spinal cord specialist in my area?

Welcome bostonfern!

As mentioned above, this is something potentially serious and needs to be looked at as soon as hospital. I suggest you see a neurosurgeon if possible and have some scans & testing done. Try keeping your neck stabilized as much ad possible meaning, try not to move it too much. I'm no expert but I can tell you that it's best you take all action to not let it get worse because we never know if it can recover.

Do you know of any big hospitals or trauma centers in the area?

bostonfern....did you read the info i linked for you on the above post of mine? It will help to explain for you.


To be honest, we can only give you info and offer you considerations. With any degeneration there is potential for the situation to worsen. You will only find out to what degree,if the disc is causing further problems due to further compression.

The advice here by 3 members of staff has been to go get checked out as soon as you can...and then leave it to the professionals to find out what is going on.

The link i sent you should shed some light on what may be happening...good luck with this and please keep us updated

I thank all of you from the bottom of heart for your concern and good advice. 

I walked into an ER on Sunday night.   They wanted to give me an MRI but the machine wasn't available that late, so the treating physician said she would fax the record to my primary physician for the latter to arrange a MRI. 

The next morning I found out the record wasn't sent, so I tried to get ER to do it.   To make a long and hard-to-believe story short, I felt I was dealing with people of different culture, that they enjoyed bossing people (me) around,  doing as little work as they can, and more than one person lied to me.   Even after I escalated the issue to the complaint department of the hospital and had them took over, it still took ER another 4 hours to fax the record.  

With the delay, I finally received a cervical MRI on Tuesday night.   It normally takes 2 days to make a report, which means tomorrow my primary physician should get it.  

Lesson learned:  at late night, I should walk into a hospital with a 24-hour trauma center.   I would like to think they have a MRI machine available at any time and somebody to make a report shortly.  This way,  I don't need to wait for 4 days.  

I got the result of the cervical MRI today. It says my neck is the same as what it was 2 months ago. In my novice eyes, this is good news for my neck.

But I'm not convinced that my spine wasn't affected by the forced bending. Every night I felt my upper body is tense and it was trying to adjust something inside. I have more mild pain and stiffness of my upper spine lately. The warm feelings below my neck would go away with the herbal anti-inflammatory I take.

I've tried to educate myself. My online research hasn't been very fruitful in understanding what have happened. I can only dig up symptoms of whiplash, and neck ache is a common symptom that can go away later. I've done research for many illnesses before. Compared with them, the information about the progression of spinal cord injury seems so little. Is it because people with SCI don't use Internet much?

A friend gave me a name of well-known spinal specialist. My appointment with him is 4 weeks later. Too far. I've tried to contact a SCI local support group several times, and haven't received any reply. You guys have been the only help I can get so far, so I'm very grateful.

I'll see whether I can convince my primary physician to give me a thoracic MRI. There is no harm in having several MRI in 2 months, right?

My thoracic MRI turns out to be fine. But I'm having more fatigue, pain with neck and upper back. I will make more appointments to check out my spine.

In the meantime, I would like to educate myself about how a spinal cord injury progresses. I've not have much luck with my online research, as most websites just explain the symptoms. How do I educate myself about the progression of spinal cord injury? Any recommendation of websites, books...etc?