NEWPORT, Ky. — When I ask Emily Robbins what she’d be doing if I weren’t here, she responds quickly.
“Working,” she said.
Robbins is a family attorney in Newport, a job she says requires her to be on her feet a lot — a difficult job that she says has been made much more difficult because of a problem in her neck.
“I had no idea just how debilitating a neck injury could be,” Robbins said. “And so I tried everything.”
Physical therapy. Two steroid injections. Massage therapy. More medications than she can list.
She describes the way she felt like this: "My body was a broomstick and my head was a bowling ball that at any point was going to tip over."
All because of a herniated disc in her neck. Something that sent pain shooting down her arm, so much so that she once called her mom because she thought she was having a heart attack.
“It was that horrible,” Robbins said.
Check out the solution she found in this video:
For months, the 30-year-old said she was misdiagnosed. And then, because of her age, she said people told her not to have surgery.
"I think there’s a stigma about having neck and back surgery," Robbins said.
She felt it every day, when all she could do was lie down after work — forget having dinner with friends.
"It was lonely," Robbins said. "It's hard for people to understand that."
Then, a doctor at Mayfield Brain and Spine recommended putting an artificial disc into her neck. It's a procedure the surgeon tells me he's performing more and more.
“The pain that people get from a herniated disc is unbearable,” said Dr. Bryan Krueger, an attending neurosurgeon there. “Life as you know it is essentially over.”
Krueger tells me the typical surgery would put more pressure on other joints, but an artificial disc helps maintain normal movement in the spine. That's especially important when someone like Robbins has so much more life to live.
“When we operate on somebody in their late 20s, we have to think about the downstream effects of it on the rest of their life,” Krueger said. “This is what Emily needed to feel better.”
And at the coffee shop near her work, somewhere she once couldn't even walk to, Robbins runs into a friend. Someone who remembers an embarrassing picture of her in a neck brace. Someone who is happy they can now go on longer walks together.
Someone who is happy she had surgery.
