Keep us posted THH. Yes nerve recovery is of course very slow. I had some symptoms of facial nerve damage after my intra-oral surgery to shorten the styloid and it took a good 6-8 months for this to improve. The neurologist that I saw said anything up to 2 years is normal. Hopefully things will continue to improve. I will be very interested to hear how you feel in another couple of months.
When I was doing a lot of reading about Eagle’s, I found very little information describing neck and shoulder pain. Occasionally an article would mention it but never really the nature of the pain or where is was isolated to, and nothing that matched my symptoms of levator scap pain.
I do feel like the right side of my body (where all of my symptoms are) is weaker. I often find myself slouching over to the right. And the right shoulder sits lower as I mentioned previously.
Despite this I have seen 2 neurologists in the past who didn’t feel that any of that was significant. The answer I got in BOTH cases was “nobody is symmetrical”. In the case of obvious muscle wasting then it is a bit more clear cut. My 2 neurologists did a basic clinical exam where they ask you to do a series of manouvres (eg shrug your shoulder etc) while they are applying pressure in the opposite direction with their hand. This is to gauge whether there is weakness. It seems like you would have to have substantial weakness for it to be obvious and also seems to be a pretty subjective way of testing. I wonder whether there is nerve irritation that could result in pain and weakness that is considered subclinical in these tests. In my case I also had a Nerve Conduction Test on various muscles in the shoulder including the upper traps. These tests showed nothing abnormal, but the neruologist went on to say that this does not necessarily mean that there is no issue with the nerve higher up, just that the brachial plexus is fine.
So, there is nothing to prove that my shoulder and neck pain is at all linked to any of my other issues. If there was I think it would be a lot easier to convince surgeons (any myself!) that this is due to Eagles as it is one of my major symptoms. If it wasn’t related then it would have to be a hell of a coincidence.
It is even harder over here in Australia where there is limited belief in Eagle’s Syndrome and radologists seem to go out of their way to convince ENT surgeons that elongated styloids are an incidental finding.