[annapurna]

The basic couple of points:

You should be freaking out. This is a big surgery. If you weren't worried, there would be something wrong with you that no ADR could fix. Don't drag yourself down telling yourself that you shouldn't be worried. Take the energy that your worries give you and see what you can do to give yourself facts to deal with worry.

Second: ADRSupport (Thank you Rich for creating this board) is a great place to learn and give you questions to ask your surgeon. It is a lousy place to figure out the probabilities of a successful surgery or likelihood of any given problem showing up. People who have successful surgeries may not even join the forum. Instead they read posts as a guest, have a successful surgery, and move on in their life without any record in the forum of the success story. What you're seeing is primarily those who have complex problems going in or less than perfect successes coming out. It's like getting your surgery success statistics by reading over the list of those who've sued the local hospital. Or, given the recent elections, like calling 100 people in Alaska and 100 people in Massachusetts then going on the air and talking about how your poll showed the country is deeply divided.

As for when to get surgery: I can't tell you this but I can point out that you're no longer in a stable situation. Steroid injections are seriously damaging and should not be used for long times. Even if they weren't, they aren't helping you now as much as they did to start, so your condition is deteriorating. To me, that says you either need to commit to the surgery or find another conservative care route that picks up where the steroid injections are no longer working. I can't think of anything to suggest but that's the way I'd look at it if it were me.

Side note: most of the really seriously bad stuff that can happen during and post-surgery become more likely as the damage in your back increases. ESIs, in particular, are linked to arachnoiditis, which could seriously mess up your life even if you did have a successful ADR surgery. You've unfortunately reached the point where every path before you has some real risks, even doing nothing.