The X-Ray I Never Thought I'd Share
I'm going to show you something I've never put on this blog before.
This is a real X-ray of my neck, taken before the surgery that finally gave me relief — a flexion view, my head bent forward, so my surgical team could see exactly what was happening to my spine when it moved the way spines are supposed to move every single day. You can see the hardware already in my neck from an earlier fusion. That X-ray was read as a C2 subluxation — my neck was unstable at the very top of my spine. Once my surgeon actually got in during the operation, the fuller picture came into focus: the earlier fusion hadn't fully healed, hardware had loosened and pulled out of place, and there was instability running from C2 down through C4. I was, in the plainest terms I know, a walking time bomb — going through my days with an unstable neck, one wrong movement away from something none of us wanted to think about. That image sat on a screen in front of me while a doctor explained, in the calm, careful way doctors explain hard things, exactly how serious it was — and that I needed a revision, a full 360 fusion from C2 to C5, front and back, to fix what had gone wrong before it went further wrong.
I'm sharing it now because I think there's a version of you reading this blog who needs to know the person behind Crown Lift isn't a founder who researched neck pain. I'm someone who lived inside it.
What that image doesn't show you
X-rays are strange that way. They show you bone and hardware in perfect black and white, but they don't show you the part where you can't turn your head to check your blind spot while driving. They don't show you counting the hours until it's late enough to justify going to bed, because lying down is the only position that doesn't hurt, and then lying down hurts too, in a different way, all night.
They don't show you the exhaustion of trying pillow after pillow — soft ones, firm ones, contoured ones, expensive ones — and feeling like you must be doing something wrong, because surely somebody makes a pillow that just works. They don't show you the moment you realize the problem was never you. It was that nobody had built a pillow for a neck like yours.
What Dr. Kim gave me back
My revision surgery — the 360 fusion — was performed by Dr. Paul Kim, and it's the surgery that actually addressed what years of pain had been pointing to all along. Recovery from something like that isn't quick, and honestly, it isn't linear. I'm still in it. Some days are much better than others, and I've stopped expecting a single finish line where I wake up and it's simply over.
But somewhere in the middle of that recovery, lying awake yet again trying to find a position that didn't punish my neck, I had the idea that became Crown Lift. Not because I set out to build a company. Because I was desperate for something that didn't exist yet, and I finally understood why: pillows were built for comfort. Nobody had built one for support — real, adjustable, keeps-up-with-your-healing support.
Why I keep telling this story
Every blog post on this site — the one about ACDF, the one about whiplash, the one about degenerative disc disease — comes from some piece of what that X-ray represents. I know what it feels like to be handed a diagnosis and sent home with no idea how you're supposed to sleep through it. I know what it's like to feel like your body is a problem nobody has quite solved for yet.
If that's where you are right now — staring at your own scan, or just staring at the ceiling at 2am — I want you to know two things. First, it gets to change; my life is proof recovery isn't a straight line but it is a real one. And second, you're not imagining that this is hard. It is hard. It's supposed to be hard. You're not failing at it.
That's the whole reason Crown Lift exists. Not as a pitch. As something I wish someone had handed me back when that X-ray was taken.
If you want to read more about how Crown Lift actually works, start here → — or if you just wanted to know there's a real person behind this brand who gets it, well. Now you do.
