Ice ice and more ice. I bought neck wraps and found migraine ice hat . you should be icing 20 on , 10 off routinely. i did this for weeks. wrap one around neck and you can walk around with it on. i found all of mine on amazon. i avoided cortisone completely. Ice is your best friend. i had my surgery in 2018 with Dr Samji. took a long time to heal without the cortisone but totally worth it since it gave me Glaucoma years ago (a side affect other than diabetes which thankfully is not my case). i drank ice slushy drinks especially in the beginning and you can make them healthy or a meal . i avoid all opiates = never took any past the first day and i got sick that night since i had no real substantive food in my stomach and barfing on your day of surgery sucked. never took any again. I use Marijuana for all the pain and other CBD products - way better and no side affects. best of luck to you in your recovery.
Good to read your post! Thank you for sharing your experience & good advice. I hope you’re doing well. 
Hope all is well with you too! One of these days we’ll have to meet up again for coffee or something like that. Outdoors though…
Would love to!
I have tried marijuana several times and have not had any relief. I know I have a lot of other spine problems but I feel like after I had the surgery that now I feel all of those things now. I can’t take this anymore I’m sick and tired of all the medication that I take. I don’t think a single one of them does anything because I don’t understand why I’m in so much pain after doing nothing. I was tinkering around in the garden no lifting no strenuous activity no nothing and boom crazy pain.
100% let’s get together.
I can’t say this enough…a styloidectomy is a major surgery. It will take 6-12 mos for your nerves & other soft tissues to recover more completely. You’re in the really early stages of recovery now & will notice that you have days where you feel pretty good followed by days where you feel awful again. That seems to be the normal recovery pattern from this surgery. If you rest on the harder days & do moderate activity (which it sounds like you are doing) on the good days, you’ll notice your recovery progressing. By two months post op, I felt significantly better & by four months even more & by six months a lot of my symptoms were gone. By twelve months, the symptoms that had lingered were pretty much gone, too. I have First Bite Syndrome that never fully went away but now that I’m approaching 8 years post op, it is disappearing. That tells me that our bodies never give up trying to get better.
Please be patient. Ice your neck on your bad days (or use heat if that works better). Give yourself permission to take it easy for the first couple of months post op even though it may be hard to do so. I pushed myself starting two weeks after surgery & think it took me longer to heal because of that. Your recovery is a game of patience. I can almost 100% guarantee you’ll feel better as time passes. If you have bilateral elongation, it may require getting the other styloid removed for you to have the best results.
You & Gail can have a private conversation on here. Just click on her screen name or avatar as it appears above her post & a page will come up that allows that to get started.
Sending you a healing hug & praying for your recovery to progress steadily.
