Everyone at UPMC was great. And my surgeons were rock stars. Bob Keeley
Bob Keeley has spent his life in motion — competitive bodybuilding, semipro road cycling, sailing, skiing, and a daily workout he does not skip. In June 2023, riding at Snowshoe Resort in West Virginia, he flipped his mountain bike and broke his neck at C6–C7.
The immediate signs were a sharp pain in his right shoulder and tingling that ran into his right arm and down to his foot. What unsettled him more was how little the fracture was holding together. Out of the brace, he says, his neck felt “like a bobblehead.”
Conservative treatment — wait, brace, hope it knits — did not sit well with him. The nerve pain persisted and so did the instability.
In late June 2023 he underwent an anterior cervical discectomy and fusion at UPMC Presbyterian, approached from the front of the neck. Carl Snyderman, MD, a UPMC otolaryngologist who specializes in head-and-neck and cranial base surgery, opened the corridor by carefully moving the esophagus aside. Dr. Agarwal then carried out the repair with a second attending neurosurgeon, Kojo Hamilton, MD, director of UPMC Neurosurgical Spine Services.
Together they removed the damaged disc between C6 and C7, set a graft into the space, and fused the vertebrae with metal plates and screws.
The pain was gone when he woke, and his neck moved again — with no brace. He went home the next day. Six weeks later he began therapeutic exercise, progressed through yoga and hiking, and was back on skis six months after the operation.
“Everyone at UPMC was great,” he says. “And my surgeons were rock stars.”