You scheduled a lumbar fusion at a Staten Island hospital expecting to walk out of physical therapy six months later with less back pain. Instead, you woke up with a foot that wouldn't lift, burning pain shooting down your leg, and a surgeon who said the words every patient dreads: "this is a known complication." Maybe it happened at Staten Island University Hospital in Ocean Breeze or at Richmond University Medical Center in West Brighton. Maybe the surgery was an L4-L5 tran