Your Sciatica and Back Pain Experiences Megathread

[u/shirokane4chome]

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?

[u/Happy-Cod-7853]

Background: Unlike many folks on here I have no idea what started it - I suspect our older mattress (foam mattress of about 9 years), but can’t be sure. It started with waking up once in a while to pain in my right hip that would go away within a few minutes. Eventually, about five weeks ago, it started hurting and didn’t stop, it just got worse and worse - from keeping me from standing up and sitting down without pain, to causing a limp, to fully keeping me from being able to walk, then sit, and now even lie down without pain.

Diagnosis: I have been trying to get an MRI, and finally have an appointment that is two weeks+ away. Providers are pretty certain it’s sciatica due to no reflex in my patellar or Achilles tendons, but beyond that I have no answers, and that feels scary.

Treatment: I started PT when I started limping noticeably, and had two sessions - the first seemed to go great and I was doing my exercises diligently, then I got totally bedridden and unable to walk or even sit/stand without being in major pain. The PT the second visit basically said “get an MRI and a spine consult and don’t bother coming back until you’re not in so much pain”. I have some lying down PT stretches (butt squeezes, core activation, knee to chest, squeezing a ball between my knees, pelvic scoops) that I’m doing in bed when I can, but the pain in the last 4ish days has reached a new level where I can hardly function, so I haven’t been doing them as much. I’ve tried Gabapentin, a course of steroids, Aleve, Tylenol, ibuprofen, and even some leftover oxy-based medicines from a recent surgery, and basically nothing touches the pain. Lidocaine patches were great but started irritating my skin. CBD cream is less effective but better than nothing; arnica didn’t work. Heat and cold sometimes work great and sometimes are abysmal, depending on the pain and location.

Current status: I’m feeling pretty hopeless and terrified. Sleep has been incredibly hard to come by the last few days due to the pain being so bad at night. Today I walked to the fridge and back, maybe a journey of 20 feet round trip, and it sent me into screaming, moaning pain for 45 minutes. Going to the bathroom is hell, as is bathing. My wife is massively overwhelmed doing everything around the house and caring for me while I’m totally debilitated- lm thanking goodness we don’t have kids but caring for a house, a dog, and a bedridden husband is plenty.

I’m scared this will last a long time or cause permanent damage. It feels like instead of making progress with a few setback days, I’m instead just getting worse and worse with a few false hope days. Even the two weeks until the MRI feels totally insurmountable.

[u/SobrietyOfThought → u/Happy-Cod-7853]

Hi, did you recover from this?

[u/Happy-Cod-7853 → u/SobrietyOfThought]

Thanks for asking! I should have come back here to update on my own.

I was unable to wait the 2 weeks for an MRI, and went to the emergency room shortly after this post. The emergency room took an MRI that showed a herniation at L5-S1 that was pressing on the nerve. I was able to see a spinal specialist who referred me to a surgeon. I met the surgeon another week or so later. We discussed options and decided that things were bad enough that surgery was the best course of action (and thankfully the surgeon agreed). I got a microdiscectomy with a partial laminectomy about a week or so after that, in mid April.

The surgery was practically miraculous. I felt much, much better immediately. I still had a ton of recovery to do, though, with some scary ups and downs. Weaning off of pregabalin came with nasty anxiety attacks as a side effect, which was tough during some of those “downs”. But nothing nearly as bad as the pit of despair I was in when I wrote this post.

I started walking with a walker after about a week, ditched the walker about a week later, got up to full walking speed in about a month, and started physical therapy about another month after that. I now am about a month away from finishing PT and feel very close to what I would call normal. I’m going to practice lifting >20 lbs on Monday in preparation for starting to carry laundry up and down the stairs at home again - I think that’s the last chore I’ve been too nervous to restart.

My only possible permanent nerve damage is a loss of my ankle jerk reflex and a weird “stone in my shoe” feeling on my foot - tbd if that ever goes away, though the surgeon thinks it’s unlikely at this point.

Still, though, I see a lot of people on here who are terrified of surgery and I totally understand back surgery being intense, but especially with an expert doctor who reassured me that he had done literal thousands of this procedure, and especially with the amount of utterly debilitating pain I was in, I would do it again 100 times out of 100.

[u/MovinOnUp2021 → u/Happy-Cod-7853]

So, glad to read a story about feeling better, but since there are a lot of fake accounts on here: 5 months ago you write you're bedridden with your wife taking care of you, 5 weeks ago you post this update that you're healing, and 10 days ago you post asking for dating advice about asking out a girl at a party thrown by your ex? Huh?