My Last (?) Week
in the Collar

Three months of continuous wear in a rigid Aspen cervical collar following spinal surgery — not removed to sleep, not removed to shower, not removed for any daily task. The collar came off only for supervised dressing changes.

The essay behind this page is a roughly seventeen-minute read. It covers what continuous immobilization actually feels like — breathing, swallowing, the microclimate under the chin plate — the practical logistics of doing daily life inside one, and the months of physical therapy that follow once the collar comes off.

The piece is written from inside the experience — not a clinical overview, not a recovery-influencer post, not a complaint. A field guide. The kind of account I went looking for before my own surgery and didn’t find.

• If you have a surgery date. You are the person this was written for. The essay names what is coming so it doesn’t arrive unannounced.
• If you’re supporting someone in a collar. The piece describes what they may not be telling you, and where the help they actually need lives.
• If you wore one and it’s still with you. Recognition is part of what the writing is for.
• If you’re weighing the surgery itself. This is not a substitute for your surgeon. But the recovery is most of the experience, and most accounts skip it.

The essay sits behind a small three-step gate: a slide-to-confirm, a short proof-of-work calculation that runs in your browser, and a session fingerprint. Together they take a few seconds. Nothing is stored beyond your session.

The friction exists because this writing was made for people, not for content scrapers and aggregators. A small amount of computational cost is the cheapest known way to keep that line drawn.