@ryanab You have presented your condition in detail and shared important information for analysis, so I can give my opinion.
It is good that you are persistent in educating yourself and looking for solutions, because ultimately you make the decision about the choice of treatment and your fight, so you should act wisely when making an important decision about surgery.
The other members have explained a lot, but I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the narrowed jugular foramen is a rather big problem for you. So I suggest that you consider in consultations with your doctors how much sense it makes to do C1 grinding, if this foramen above is causing you to narrow.
In your MRI scan, I noticed that you have a narrowing of the right vertebral artery, it is hypoplastic, so (if you haven’t already) you should do a transcranial color Doppler to see the flow values through the vertebral and basilar arteries.
This can cause you a lot of trouble, if not now, then as you get older, but there is a therapy for that that can improve the condition. I speak from my own experience, because my right VA is also hypoplastic and I have been taking medication for the past 6 years (I am now 47).
I marked your MRI that I looked at:
Regarding IIH, you have reason to believe. What immediately struck me on your MRI image was that your sella is empty, which is a possible indicator of IIH, but that does not confirm the diagnosis, but rather raises the possibility.
I also have an empty sella, but IIH has not yet been confirmed. In 15 days I will have another MRI of the brain and I will do an MRI of the orbit for the first time, so we will see what happens next.
Unlike me, your symptoms started much earlier, because for me everything started going downhill at the age of 42, but we have a lot of symptoms in common, so you can see my story:
https://forum.livingwitheagle.org/t/my-problems-with-es-c1-and-scm-are-causing-compression-on-ijv/16546/4