Disclaimer: I’m not looking for medical advise as I’ve got a doctor for that, I’m just looking for other experiences etc.
I got an attack 3 weeks ago. 1st week was excruciating, 2nd bad but a lot better. Now I’ve got a limp and my half my foot is dead and I’ve a very weak calf muscle. Today in work it got pretty bad again and I had to resort back to my pain killers to get trough. They make me pretty dopey so I had to concentrate hard to stay on top of things.
I’m a bit pissed off as I thought I was over the hump but it seems I’ve still got a bit to go
What are your experiences with this bastard? I’ve been doing the exercises that the doctor gave me and am still taking anti-inflammatories and pain killers as required. Did it take you long to get back to normal etc.
Sciatica is a bitch who gives no warning as to when she’s gonna make a visit, no indication how long she’s gonna stay, and doesn’t tell you if you’ll be in Hell or just pergatory while she visits.
She doesn’t know what she wants either. Does she want you to exercise or rest? She won’t tell you. Does she want to visit just your ass or will she be travelling up and down your leg? Will your ankle and knee work or will they buckle under? Will she be gone forever? 2 years? 2 months? 2 days?
I had very bad sciatica from a ruptured L5S1 disk that massively extruded. It took a year of PT, 1200 Percocets, a bottle of morphine, a few ER injections of something truly wonderful, 2000 Naproxen, 3 spinal stearoid injections, 600 Gabapentins, and 1 diskectomy/foraminotomy to get me more or less over it. By more or less, I mean my foot’s still partly paralyzed and I have a little pain every day, but I don’t plan anything around it.
Unfortunately, you somewhat choose your own treatment plan when you decide which doctor to ask for treatment. If I had it all to do over, I’d do the surgery as soon as possible, but everybody’s mileage varies all over the place, unfortunately.
Yes but from pregnancy & not as a ongoing disorder.
It hurt like a bitch though. I hated getting up in the morning and not knowing if my leg would buckle under me. Or getting out of the shower. Or standing up from breakfast.
Felt like this skinny, flaming hot, electric poker would run up my leg and through my butt and up towards my spine. The kind of pain you just can’t describe to someone who has never felt it.
My 80 year old grandmother has it too and while I was pregnant we’d call each other and complain and compare symptoms.
Having the baby cured me though, thank god. Those of you suffering from it day in-and-out have my utmost sympathy.
My dad had it for a while last year. He’s diabetic, too, and the stress of being in pain all the time was making it hard for him to maintain good levels. He ended up with surgery and they found a cyst in the spine that was pressing on the nerve. Fortunately they were able to remove it and he’s made a very good recovery.
Had it bad, haven’t had an attack in a while, thank God. Massage helped a bit – so did some exercises, but be careful – a chiropractor gave me some to do that made things much worse.
Fuck yes. For 7 months. Cripling. I thought I had a softball in my left ass cheek and a sewing needle in my tail-bone.
I thought I’d never do anything athletic again, ever. Couldn’t tie shoes, put socks on, pick up shit I dropped on the ground, every exertion caused a grimace. Even driving to work was a bitch, and then getting out of the car after the ride in was a treat. I walked like I was 75 (I was 32).
I got out of it finally by doing some stretching exercises that the chiro started on me and I finished up on my own by copying what he did in the office at home. I hung from the rafters in the garage by my hands and let the lower half of my body go limp. This allowed the spacing between the two herniated disks to open up and the swelling to go down. I’ve had mild attacks since but nothing that lasted for more than a couple hours. Once I feel it coming on I can head it off at the pass. Now I just bend slightly over with my hands on my knees until I hear a crack and I go about my business again.
Yes, she’s a beotch alright.
Stay active, keep the body limber, stretch, and know your limits.
I think I’ve been over doing it a bit on the walking front. My walking limit seems to be about 100m. After that I need a break as the leg really starts to ache. My boss said I could expense taxis in and out of work till I get better which is cool.
I was thinking a cane may help but maybe I’ve been watching House too much.
I’ve been having trouble with mine for the past few weeks on and off. Last weekend I was in so much pain that I could hardly walk. My husband has to help me put my pants on for 3 days.
Physical therapy didn’t do anything for me. I see a chiropractor when it gets this bad. I’ve got weakness in my thigh and can’t lift my leg very well. A couple of sessions with my chiro and I’m realigned, so my muscles know what to do again (after the initial soreness, of course). I have another session tomorrow and I should be better for a few months again.
I’ll chime in with an optimistic story just to be fair…
I had it a few years ago for about 4 weeks. Felt like a butcher knife in my ass digging into my hip bone for the worst part of it, which was about 10 days near the beginning. But it actually went away on it’s own and all in all wasn’t the worst thing I’ve encountered.
I figured out that sitting at a computer slouching or 10 hours a day wasn’t a good idea. Now I get up every 20-30 minutes no matter what and at least walk around the hallway for a minute or 2. That makes me feel much better.
I suffered from sciatica pain for about 5 years, but not as bad as some of the posters here, it sounds like. Mine was just a constant, sharp, really annoying pain running from deep inside my left butt cheek to my foot, but it didn’t cause my leg to buckle or make me walk hunched over or anything. Many many anti-inflammatorys and painkillers taken with no real results. It started for me in 1996. The only thing I found that offered lasting relief was weight training. I think that strengthening the muscles around my midsection- abs and lower back, as well as legs- took the pressure off the sciatic nerve somewhat. That’s why I work like hell to maintain a fairly regular exercise and weightlifting routine. Nothing to get me pumped like Arnold, just general all-around fitness. And running. I’ve been running for the last 5-6 years and it’s done wonders.
Oh my Og! I feel for you all. My only attack was 3 months ago when I got up from my recliner. My right glute, upper right thigh and calf ached like never before. I took a couple ibus and went to bed and did get to sleep, though with some pain. Still painful in a.m., but went to work and had to be on the road before I could get some more ibus at noon and made an appt. with GP. He dosed multi ibus every 6 hours, with freebie anticoags to counteract any stomach bleeding. He said the sciatic nerve can get pinched by a spur on the vertebra and inflamed. The treatment worked fine for me. Pain gone the next day and ever since, thank GP and Og.
This sounds a lot like my dad’s experience. He had sciatica for over a year, was in agony whenever he was standing up, and found that the pain was travelling lower and lower down his leg as the year wore on. He tried all kinds of pain medication (even Dilaudid) and he claimed it didn’t even touch the pain. Had three or four epidurals. Tried acupuncture, the chiropractor, yoga…he was so desperate he even visited a shaman when he was on a trip to Peru (no joke). Nothing. The doctors made him go through several MRIs and CAT scans and only this spring did they discover a herniated disc.
He had back surgery in May to scrape some of the disc away from the sciatic nerve, and he’s been pain-free ever since. It took less than a week to recover from the surgery, too.
Lord god do I have sciatica. I’ve got 17 fused vertebrae as a result of scoliosis repair and the worst of it is left sided sciatica. It varies from not very bad to OMFG KILL ME bad. Mine is chronic and will probably be around forever. I use alternating heat and ice therapy as well as anti-inflammatories, stretching, and walking to help it.
I went through a period where when I walked I would get an excruciating pain in my left ass cheek and would be unable to keep walking. That acute episode was mercifully short (about 6 weeks?) and not it’s just a chronic thing.
Oh, and I’ve also had relief from physical therapy/massage. And if you go to physical therapy they have these UBERHOT heating pad things that are made from god’s own hands, I swear it. I’ve had significant relief from those.
Dammit. I’ve taken today off work as it was very bad again this morning. Stay in bed bad as when I’m lying down the pain in a mild ache were as it’s very sore once I start moving around.
I’ve had a mild case of it for the past year, with it being the worst this past spring (April, '07). My doctor took some X-rays and sent me to a really great physical therapist. Keep in mind that nobody at this point said that I might have a herniated disk.
The pain in my right hip joint was almost completely gone, but then the back pain started… intermittently at first. It wasn’t so much pain as it was pressure in the center of my lower back. It would start for just a hour or so, then vanish for weeks at a time, then come back and last longer. My latest episode was last week and it lasted for 6 days.
My doctor has me scheduled for an MRI next week so we can see how bad the disk is. It’s funny. Part of me wants it to be very mild so that only physical therapy is needed, but the other part of me wants it to be bad enough for surgery so that it is PERMANENTLY fixed.
I guess I will see what will happens after the MRI.
>Part of me … wants it to be bad enough for surgery so that it is PERMANENTLY fixed.
Yeah, well, that’s a problem too. After they carve around in there, you start growing scar tissue, and the scar tissue can constrict the nerve and cause the same kind of problem again. However, it is very difficult to go back in and disect it away, and of course every invasion triggers more scar tissue. And, there are no sure things here.
A useful rule of thumb is that back surgery to trim disks is about 85% effective at fixing radicular pain (phantom pain in the limb caused by nerve root compression) and about 50% effective at fixing back pain per se. By “effective” I think we mean something like “substantially reducing the pain, as observed a year or two after the surgery”. I don’t know what the percentages are on trouble years later caused by the scar tissue.
At least you can lay in bed and get out. I had it so bad one time that I couldn’t get out of bed for 4 hours. It hurt soooo bad it took my breath away. I could have sworn that my spinal cord was stretching in half whenever I tried to put any pressure on my leg that day. I couldn’t even drag it as I crawled. Any activity that included movement of the lower half of the body was not going to happen.
Then there were the nights when I had to sleep on the living room floor with my legs (from the knees down) on the sofa. So, basically, I was lying on my back with my torso and butt on the floor, my thighs straight up in the air, and from the knees down were resting on the couch cushions. If I stayed like that all night I could somewhat function in the morning.
I don’t miss the mid-day twinges, by twinge I mean the heart-stopping pain that would come on for no apparent reason, paralyze you, and make you pray for death.
God, I miss that.
Yeah, avoid surgery, use as a last effort. My chiro said that he treats a lot of folks that had surgery and weren’t fixed. I’ve got two friends that had horror stories about back pain and surgery. In both cases the surgery didn’t even come close to what the patients expected as far as loss of pain after recovery. Although my dad did have surgery and he’s been fixed so far.
