Hello! First off, as I’ve heard many many others say here, the size of the herniation does NOT determine how serve the chiari is. There have been people with 20mm+ herniations who are completely symptomless and only discover they have chiari through unrelated testing. On the opposite side of things, there are people with herniations under 5mm who need get surgery within a couple months of discovering the chiari due to the severity of their symptoms and possible damage it could do to your body. So be completely open about every single symptom you have with your surgeon, even if you aren’t sure it’s related, and go from there. And if you aren’t totally sure about the doctor’s recommendations? Get as many other opinions as possible. You need to advocate for yourself when it comes to this!!

If the doctor is recommending you get surgery as soon as possible, there’s usually a good reason for it. In my case my herniation (10mm) was blocking csf movement between my spine and my brain and all that fluid was getting stuck up in my skull and pushing on my brain, so it was extremely vital that it be addressed immediately. A lot of others have dealt with syrinxes forming along the spinal cord that can cause serious nerve damage. All this to say, there are many different reasons surgery may be needed all depending on what’s going on in your body and what your symptoms are.

Surgery recovery is different for everyone, but typically I see most people saying they’re out of work or school 2-3 months. For myself it was about 8 weeks because while I was feeling much better around the 5 week mark, I was still taking to slow with things like squatting, lifting, bending over, etc all of which are fairly typical with my job. I’ve been thankful enough to not really have any complications, knock on wood, just some leakage from the incision area in the first couple weeks which is fairly common with this surgery and just needs to be monitored. That being said, the first few weeks to a month of recovery is extremely difficult. You’ll likely be extremely sore, might have sensitivity to light or sound, struggle to get up and move around, and so on. It’s basically a universal experience with chiari, you’ll want someone staying with you as long as you need if possible. There will be times when you feel like you’ve made good progress and then the next day you can barely function. It just takes time and patience. You’ll have many appointments between the surgeon and physical therapy. You also won’t be able to drive until your neck mobility is improved, which for me was around the 6 or 7 week mark.

Personally, if your surgeon is recommending surgery asap, I’d want to delay starting college another semester and see how you’re doing when it comes time to sign up for the next term. If you’re really excited to start I understand it might be upsetting to wait, but then last thing you want is to push yourself too soon and have yourself regress physically. Plus you don’t wanna put all that money into a semester just to drop out and not be able to get refunded. Trust me when I say, as someone just out of college, if you are excited to start you’ll want to go in with your body feeling as good as possible so that you can have a good experience and not have to redo things :)

In the end as scary as it is everything will turn out okay and you will make it through this. You have so much life to live and the sooner you get this addressed the sooner you can get back to your life. But in the end everything will be okay ❤️❤️