Advanced Spine and Neurosurgical Associates

I broke my neck one night when I got up and went to the bathroom. My neck struck a night table real hard, you know, sharp on the edge and I heard all the cracking going on and it shattered four cervical and fractured two thoracic and fractured her sternum. There was a possibility that I could have some paralysis and it was going to be a stiff challenge, you know. My practice is a bit different than other neurosurgical practices in the sense that I focus on cervical spine pathologies, degenerative, traumatic, and neoplastic or tumor disorders of the cervical spine and I’m blessed to have two partners who have a similar interest in lumbar spine pathologies so I can pretty much focus my practice on cervical procedures and I’ve done somewhere in the order of four to thousand to forty five hundred of these over my career at Self Regional Health Care. Prior to the surgery, my challenges were constant pain for a number of years, neck stiff, couldn’t turn my head, look either way. It created a lot of issues when you’re trying to work, when you’re trying to spend time with your family. So one of the most common surgeries that we do here, that I do, is an anterior cervical fusion surgery, which is where you remove the discs and/or bone to decompress the nerves or spinal cord in the cervical spine. And this is done to relieve patients of severe arm and neck pain as well as prevent them from experiencing progressive and worsening myelopathy, which is a condition that can lead to progressive paralysis. So it’s a rewarding type of surgery to do. by and large, do very, very well for me. – The care was amazing. Wayne Mounts and Diana Cobb, which work with Dr. Kilburn, were amazing. They were there at my bedside. They always succeeded in getting me comfortable. And it was just amazing how the entire hospital, you know, everybody that was connected With my care, they were so courteous and kind and caring. They just acted like I was part of their family. – Self-Free General has been a leader in the upstate in terms of technological innovation in neurosurgery. We were one of the first hospitals to have interoperative CT scanning in the upstate, and we’ve managed to keep up with state-of-the-art innovation for cranial and for spinal disorders with the acquisition of two new O arms in our operating room suites. – The impact of the care here and the surgery is I no longer have pain. I no longer have neck stiffness. I can do pretty much anything I want to do. I’m back lifting, walking, doing riding roller coasters, doing whatever I want to do. It’s a great change. I’m really happy. We’ve seen tremendous advances in the 25 years of my career thus far at Self Regional Healthcare. I think we’re a leader in the upstate in terms of innovation. We’re very blessed to have an excellent, cohesive team of physicians and auxiliary staff for the treatment of spinal disorders, for the treatment of neoplastic disease including brain tumors. We have a comprehensive neuro-oncology program where we analyze patients and the data pertaining to their treatment and we offer a collective multi-disciplinary appraisal of those patients. We have state of the art stereotactic radiosurgery unit for treating metastatic disease of the brain. One of the few places in a hospital our size to be able to do that. With the great care that Dr. Kilburn gave me and the staff there at the hospital, it was just amazing how I recuperated and could go home even without rehab. I am a miracle to be sitting here and have all my faculties are mobile and I still do everything that I want to do and need to do. I love to cook, bake and that sort of thing, so I’m up and at it.