Originally Posted by c_dinsmore

Hello, everyone! I will introduce myself here and explain why I'm here before searching for others with similar situations and their previous findings.

My name is Colin. I'm 25 years old. On 5 sep 2012, I was attacked (in an unfathomably extreme case of road rage) by someone who stabbed me multiple times in the back of the head and once near the base of the neck. He then slit my throat, in as Hollywood a fashion as you can conjure in your mind. While sounding horrible, every wound missed its fatal target by millimeters, and in the end, very little damage was done!

That is, other than this one remaining issue: My right side Spinal Accessory Nerve was severed, ending motor control to my Trapezius and perhaps Sternocleidomastoid. This generally creates a severe limitation in shoulder/limb function. However, I have regained range of motion to within 10deg of my unaffected side, and have decent strength. As the shoulder surgeon I recently saw said, "You are the most function patient with no trapezius that I have ever seen". However, I have found through research that with a fairly strait forward procedure to reconnect the severed nerve, I could likely regain total function and prevent the negative symptoms that reportedly never lesson, and sometimes increase, with time.

At 3.5 months past injury, I have already missed the window of ideal opportunity for this nerve reconstruction. Somewhere between hospital chaos and doctors' miscommunication, the loss of this nerve went overlooked and therefore was effectively "un-diagnosed" and untreated. While this, well, sucks, it's not the end of the world. In my understanding a nerve re-connection, perhaps with graft, is a very viable option for up to twenty months after injury.

So my main two dilemmas are these:
1) Where is the best place to seek this procedure? It doesn't seem to fall neatly into the official medical disciplines. (Yesterday a hand surgeon's receptionist scoffed at me for insisting that he might even consider working on my shoulder injury, because it wasn't a hand).
2) THIS IS MY PRIMARY, AND URGENT, CONCERN: My wife and I have had planned for a long time a three month bicycle tour of Central America. It was only this week that I realized a severed nerve was the cause of my trapezius weakness and atrophy. Our planned departure date for our trip is in four days. So, I have been calling everyone I can think of to get an answer to this basic question: "Do we need to cancel our trip so that I can seek surgery immediately?" To what extent does postponing the surgery from 4 months after injury to 7 months after injury, affect either the likelihood of success or the return of trapezius strength/function after regaining innervation? This is obviously a very grey area with no concrete answers, being not wholly known and substantially affected by an individual body's process of healing. But, we have been looking forward to this awesome adventure of ours for a long time, and I really hate to cancel it simply as a measure of caution that in the end will not have any significant affect on my outcome. On the other hand, I am of course willing to do just that if it will greatly increase my chance of a full or near full recovery.

So, I will poking around on here looking for some answers based on other users' experiences and asking for some guidance in determining my course. If you read this and have any suggestions or useful places to put my inquiries, please, please, let me know, as I have a very immediate deadline for deciding whether to go on my trip or cancel it. Thank you much to all who consider and/or respond!