Bigpede,
You have my thoughts and prayers first and formost.

Your questioning regarding which doctor is right is not hard for me to guess; and that's all we can really do is give you our past experiences to draw your conclusions from.

The way I got tos was from being positioned wrong on the operating table during a surgery. My neck was either hyperextended or my arm positioned wrong and I came out of the surgery with tos. My neurologist from UCLA tells me this is how I got it and I believe her.

If you have a doctor telling you that you need to seek compensation if you're not better, it's pretty clear that he thinks this injury should not have happened.

Your surgeon is going to do everything to cover his b*tt and he will probably try to drag this out as long as possible, trying to keep you happy until the statute of limitations is over for a medical malpractice suit.

I know because I have been there.

The surgeon (if your situation turns out to be like mine) is going to tell you that you are doing great because he doesn't want to give you the idea that you have been wronged.

The statute of limitations in Calif is 1 year from when you THINK you may have been harmed. With a surgery my attorney told me it is usually a year from the date of surgery.

It seems to me that your surgeon may not be the best one to give you advice since he is in a position to be sued for what happened to you.

In my case, to prove that the surgeon fell below standard of care another surgeon that does the same surgery has to say that the surgeon fell below standard of care.

It was nice for my neurologist to support me, telling me how my injury happened.
But my lawyers needed to find a surgeon to testify against the surgeon that harmed me.

I'm not an attorney, but I am a RN who lost a rewarding career and you know all the rest to an error that was made in the operating room.

I had to see other doctors to get treatment because my surgeon just kept telling me that " nurses who have surgery always seem to think they are having problems."

In reality they had given me a brachial plexus stretch injury which evolved into severe bilateral neurogenic and vascular tos; permantly disabling me and turning my life upside down. Now my life is one of chronic pain and the debilitating problems of tos.

Please, find a medical malpractice attorney and find out what can be done about this situation. They probably have a list of doctors they draw on to give opinions about if your surgeon fell below standard of care. It is important to get the opinion of one of the top tos docs(see the doctor list sticky) as anyone else will not have the understanding of tos and it's complexity.

You must not let the statute of limitations run out ( they are different state to state)