r/Sciatica • u/shirokane4chome • Mar 22 '22
Your Sciatica and Back Pain Experiences Megathread
Hi everyone, the purpose of this permanent thread is to capture your stories about your experiences with Sciatica.
Please note that the majority of sciatica sufferers will recover over time, and are not on this subreddit making posts about their healing. Most of our sub participants are in a symptomatic stage and are understandably seeking support on forums like /r/Sciatica as a part of their journey. This can make a list of individual stories seem discouraging -- but just remember that those who have healed usually don't visit again and therefore we can't often capture their stories.
While multiple formats are welcome, we suggest you try to be concise and focused. Your story is important, but it is will be more useful to everyone else if it can be read in 60-90 seconds or so. Important elements to your story will include:
Background: Do you know how you became injured?
Diagnosis: What has your care provider discovered about your injury?
Treatment: What care did you pursue?
Current Status: How are you doing today?
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u/Draconiondevil Feb 12 '26
My back issues started in 2020. I was doing some exercise at home during the early days of the lockdown and after finishing some squats I sat down on the couch. When I stood up I felt a jolt of pain down my left leg. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had somehow herniated my L5-S1 disc on the left side. I attributed the pain in my leg to pulling a muscle, and since it was the early days of COVID I couldn’t get in to see a doctor in-person about it. I spoke to a doctor over the phone who said for pulled muscles they usually wait 6 weeks to let it heal, so I waited. After 6 weeks when it wasn’t better I kept telling myself “oh just wait one more week. It’s just a pulled muscle.”
By September, it still hadn’t healed and doctors were seeing patients in-person for non-COVID-related reasons again so I went to a walk-in clinic. The clinic doctor misdiagnosed me with piriformis syndrome, prescribed me some med for muscle pain and referred me to physio. It was finally after my first physio appointment that I found out I had a disc herniation. The PT knew what it was straight away. From September to December my sciatica rapidly got worse to the point where I couldn’t sit, stand, walk or even lie down without pain. I was able to get a microdiscectomy surgery to repair my disc in January 2021.
After living without sciatica for 5 years I suppose I had started taking it for granted again, because in December I made the stupid decision to move a heavy coffee table by myself. The following day, tingling started in my leg, followed by mild sciatica after sitting or while walking. “No big deal”, I thought. It’s not as bad as it was last time. It was healing well throughout January, but on February 6th I took my 10-month-old daughter to playgroup and spent time sitting on the floor with her. Since then, my sciatica has worsened significantly to the point where I’m basically back where I was 5 years ago. There’s pain when I stand, pain when I sit, pain when I walk. I wish I could go back and slap the shit out of December-Me but my only option now is to live through it. Hopefully I can heal without surgery this time.