Long Live The New Flesh: or, What Exactly is Going On inside my Body as of late.

This is rumor control; here are the facts.

On Thursday of this week, I had some surgery to excise two cervical discs from my neck.

They were worn down, compressed, and in the early-to-middle stages of calcification due to a genetic defect called Klippel-Feil Syndrome. These messed-up discs were impinging on my spinal cord, which had been causing me a lot of various and sundry issues over the past few years (haptic asynchrony, nerve pain, numbness, moodswings, existential terror, pinched nerves, and microburst headaches). It wasn't until my primary physician, Dr. Barbara Rogowski-Kent, who is awesomely pragmatic, suggested that I get a cervical MRI that we realized all of these things were tied to the same root cause.

Anyway, as of Thursday, those discs are gone. They have been replaced by bone grafts donated by someone I don't know and metal brackets to help it all fuse together appropriately. For about a day after the surgery, I had an insane-looking neck drain that looked like an Ood brain (for those of you who are Whovians). When they removed the drain from me, it was definitely surreal and felt like an Upstream Color moments, iffen you know what I mean.

I'm recovering currently. There are an abundance of interesting brusises and such everywhere, and I'll confess to not looking at my main incision or the currently-healing drainhole because I am not of sufficient fortitude to do so, But I'm feeling - different. I'm feeling better.