Kassidy Freeman doesn’t see herself as a spectator in her three children’s very active lives. She strives to be right there spending quality time with them as they play and grow. But several years ago, severe neck pain threatened to sideline the busy 34-year-old mother.

Kassidy mainly noticed the pain while at work. Her job in a grocery store required her to do a lot of heavy lifting. As the pain became more persistent, however, it began to take a toll on everything from her sleep to her emotional health.

“I never wanted my kids to watch me hurt all the time,” Kassidy says. “I don’t want my kids to remember me as somebody who had to stay in bed and watch their lives pass by.”

Watch Kassidy’s Story

In between holding down her full-time job and being with her family, it became Kassidy’s mission to stop the pain and regain normal movement in her neck. She tried over-the-counter medications, massage and physical therapy, chiropractic care and even injections. The pain always came back, and no one could really figure out what was wrong.

She then turned to Adrian Harvey, D.O., a spine and neurosurgeon on the medical staff at Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Fort Worth and at Texas Health Neurosurgery & Spine Specialists, a Texas Health Physicians Group practice. Harvey took a two-step approach to diagnosing the source of Kassidy’s neck pain and treating it. First was an MRI to visually identify the issue in her neck. Next came finding the underlying source of the pain.

“There was one specific disc, in other words the cushion between two bones, that seemed to be much worse than the others,” Harvey says.

Once the location of the bad disc was pinpointed, Harvey was able to target it with isolated injections to try to manage the pain and to see if Kassidy got sufficient relief. When her pain diminished, it was the confirmation Harvey was looking for that her pain was being caused by the damaged disc. One more step was then needed: surgery.

“We decided together to do an artificial disc replacement, which is a surgery where we go in and take out the bad disc and place a replacement disc into that space. This allows for those [surrounding] two bones to move as they normally would,” according to Harvey.

Artificial disc replacement surgery is designed to preserve motion in the neck and relieve the nerve compression that can happen when the bones in the neck deteriorate. Because the procedure is considered minimally invasive, only a very small incision needed to be made on Kassidy’s neck to enable the structures in the area to be moved aside. The disc could then be removed with little scarring and post-operative pain and only minimal impact to other parts of the neck.

“Almost immediately after, I felt pain relief,” Kassidy says. After just two weeks of recovery time, she was back to her work and activities with her children.

“My pain is completely gone, and my life has resumed to normal. I definitely recommend Texas Health Fort Worth because from the moment we walked in, from checking in to leaving, they were amazing,” she adds.

“Texas Health Fort Worth is a fantastic place,” Harvey says. “People here really want patients to get better. They go out of their way to take care of them. But also we have cutting edge technology, and we have a multidisciplinary team who cares for patients.”

Kassidy now gets up every morning without the need to take medicine to manage her neck pain and get through the day. The pain is no longer there.

“My kids deserve a mom that can be there and do things with them, and when they grow up they can look back and be like, ‘Man, my mom was awesome.’”

To find out how neck or back pain may be affecting your life, take the Back Health Assessment or visit YourBackHealth.com for more information.

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