Curious Cockatoo

Three months of back pain: fear and regret

Just after I was diagnosed with a herniated disc, I started to familiarize myself with the topic. As I learned more, I began to worry about the implications of that injury.

After all, the spine is such a central part of our bodies. When I think about injuries to the spine, pictures of complicated surgery, faces contorted with pain, and wheelchairs immediately pop into my head.

I kept thinking about the two or three people in my life with chronic back pain too. Didn’t they suffer from the same injury? Will I end up like them?

These worries soon grew into deep-seated fear. Most of my waking moments were consumed by thoughts about my injury. I began to pay attention to every little sensation in my body, wondering what it meant. I continued my research, occasionally feeding my fear by reading horror stories on the internet. And I obsessed about maintaining correct posture and movement patterns, trying to bend my back as little as possible.

Questions like the following kept me from falling asleep:

On top of all that fear, there was also a fair amount of regret: why did I let it come to this? Why didn’t I take care of myself better? Why did I maintain such a sedentary lifestyle? Why stopped paying attention to proper form when lifting weights?

The lowest point I reached when one day, I had purchased a few items of groceries too much. As usual, I put everything into my backpack and pulled it over my shoulders. I walked a few steps out of the supermarket before I noticed something was off. The tingling sensation down my left leg and the stabbing pain in my left buttocks had gotten stronger. A theory of what was happening formed in my mind: the additional weight compressed my slipped disk, which got squeezed and pressed out against the nerves in my spine. Immediately, I removed the backpack. After a short while, things got better. But now I was facing a dilemma: how would I get home with those groceries?

At that moment, I felt broken, disabled and helpless. And I am not ashamed to admit that this experience has moved me to tears.

Over the days and weeks that followed, I began to feel better.

Once I had started to give my back some rest, the actual pain receded noticeably. I was able to stay active every day, as long as I avoided certain movements and applied proper form for others. This boosted my confidence, because I noticed that I could still get through most of my day without pain.

The few times I did something harmful for my back (e.g. quickly stepping out of my bed, in the middle of the night, carrying my son to his potty), some of the symptoms flared up again, but never for more than a day. As a result, I stopped thinking of each mistake as a catastrophe. Instead, I came to began to see my symptoms as trustworthy teachers.

For a while, I brought my diagnosis up in pretty much every conversation. Be it friends, family, faint acquaintances, or even our pediatrician, they all got to listen to my story. Many responded by telling me about their own back injuries. That’s when I learned both how common a herniated disc is and how most people live without any symptoms whatsoever. This was really reassuring.

Last, but not least, physical therapy helped me to extend my repertoire of movements again.

All this has brought back my optimism again and made me hope for a full recovery. The worries and fears are still with me, but they are way less intense. It’s like they have faded into the back of my mind, where – sadly – they still linger.