It's fascinating to me that the PTs, the surgeon, and the MRI/radiologist each had a partial understanding of my injury, but nobody was able to correctly predict the exact problem in advance of the actual surgery.

What's that mean for you, or for my advice to anybody else with the sort of pain that you can learn to live around but might prefer to fix? Go talk to many different sorts of people in the medical world. Doctors. Surgeons. Physical therapists. Get the MRI. Get the Xray. Get data of all sorts. And make sure the opinions of each specialist find their way to one another, hoping some sort of consensus emerges.