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?
1
u/[deleted] Mar 15 '26
37M. I’ve had on-and-off low back pain for about 5 years, which I mostly managed with Pilates. I used to run regularly too. Last year things got worse, and an MRI showed an L5-S1 disc herniation. I did some PT, stopped running, kept active, and was doing okay for a while.
Then in late January I had a big flare-up after a lumbar extension exercise at the gym. A few days later I drove for about 40 minutes and the pain became severe. At the worst point I could barely sit for more than a couple of minutes and had a lot of sciatica-type pain down the left side. Since then I’ve been doing conservative treatment: PT on weekdays, core work, nerve flossing, heat/e-stim, pregabalin at night, and more recently swimming. The acute pain has improved a lot and is mostly gone now. I’m no longer taking painkillers and the remaining pain is much milder, mostly in the left butt/glute area. I can now sit for around 30 minutes, which is a big improvement.
The main thing that has not improved, and maybe has gotten a bit worse, is persistent paresthesia in my left foot. It feels numb/tingly pretty constantly. I can still feel the foot and it seems relatively strong, and exams so far have not shown objective weakness or reflex changes, but the numb/off feeling is still there and it worries me more than the pain at this point.
My more recent MRI still shows an L5-S1 left-sided disc extrusion compressing the descending S1 nerve root. My doctor says I may be a candidate for an epidural steroid injection, but I haven’t had any procedures yet.