How do I estimate my injury/damage?

What’s the actual process for filing a claim for physical impairment following an L5S1 spinal surgery? I need to know what the procedure looks like and what kind of disability percentage I can realistically expect... thanks in advance for any helpful info

Look, you should probably sit down and have a serious talk with your primary care physician about this. You could try appearing before the Social Security Administration disability board, but from what I’ve gathered, you won't walk away with anything. In this country, unfortunately, patients with conditions like yours often find themselves completely overlooked when it comes to disability percentages or any kind of financial relief. It's a brutal reality. You just end up working until you're physically broken.

The system is completely mismanaged here—they’re looking at functional X-rays to determine disk damage when you can't even see the disk in the shot... I mean, do I really need to go on?

Physical injury claims and the subsequent benefits tied to them were pretty much phased out somewhere around the turn of the millennium. If you had already secured those benefits before the change, they didn't just strip them away from you. At least, that’s my understanding of how it went down.

So, I'm dealing with ankylosing spondylitis—it’s a real pain, literally—and I need to submit my medical records to the Social Security Administration so they can figure out my disability rating. Even though I’m currently unemployed and don't have any income coming in, they're still insisting I pay a $102 fee just to process the paperwork. Has anyone here dealt with this before? I was wondering if anyone could give me a rough idea of what kind of rating I might get based on what someone else received.

Here’s what my medical reports say:

Cervical spine imaging shows lordosis along with arthrosis in the small joints. At the C3-C4 level, and slightly at C4-C5, there's some ventral and more pronounced dorsal overlapping of the intervertebral space caused by syndesmophytes, which are also involving the lateral and dorsal longitudinal ligaments. These findings seem consistent with mild changes related to ankylosing spondylitis.
The lumbar spine shows lordosis, but otherwise looks pretty normal for my age.

The X-ray of the thoracolumbar junction shows a slight S-shaped scoliosis. The bone density looks a little low. The vertebral body heights are mostly fine, except for TH12, which has a slightly lower upper anterior edge, along with a reactive ventral osteophyte and sclerosis on the endplate, but nothing else stands out. The intervertebral spaces look okay.

The pelvic CT scan shows evidence of erosive sacroiliitis on both sides—it's definitely worse on the right—with significant narrowing of the joint space. There are cystic degenerative changes in the femoral heads, though an enchondroma is also a possibility. The hip joint spaces are reduced, and there's evidence of enthesophytes and sclerosis at the symphysis. Basically, there's widespread enthesopathy.