Are you trying to figure out if you should go for surgery? With cervical ribs, your odds of a good surgical outcome are higher. However, scar tissue can undo anyone's situation, as it did mine.

I've been at this for 11 years. I tried everything before surgery and nothing worked. Surgery didn't work, either. So, obviously, my perspective is not as optimistic as it might be.

It seems to me that TOS is a lifetime experience for most of us. My surgeon said that even if surgery was successful, I shouldn't go back to my previous work (as an attorney), because the risk of re-injury was too great.

Many of the activities that you can't do now without pain, you would probably still need to limit in the future if you were to have surgery. Some people are fortunate enough to have complete recoveries but, usually, folks need to be careful with their activities. So I think you need to factor that into your assessment of your situation.

Good luck to you. It's sounds like you have a lot of good things going on in your life. I read a book that said we need to fill our lives with lots of good things so chronic pain is 1 of 100 things in our life, rather than 1 in 2 or 3, or the only thing. That always made a lot of sense to me.

Take care,
Kelly