A while back, I started having this weird pain running down the back of my leg. Knowing that there was no injury to my leg and it obviously wasn't muscle pain of any kind, I went to the doctor pretty quickly and he told me that it was likely to be an inflamed nerve. He put me on a course of anti-inflammatories and they helped some but far from completely. Then he had me have an MRI. It turns out that I have a herniated disc. Woo.

So, does anyone have any advice of any nature? I already have an appointment with a neurosurgeon to discuss options, but I was hoping that others here might have something useful to say. Surgeons are often quick to fall back on the knife, and I'd rather not do that if makes any sense not to. That is, I don't want to live my whole life in pain if surgery will fix it up, but I'm willing to live with it for a few weeks or months if some physical therapy or something else non-invasive has a decent chance of working. I can always fall back on the surgery if it doesn't work out.

I recently did some googling about herniated discs because I had lower back pain. Everything I read said that they can often heal themselves over time.

I believe my particular lower back pain may have been just a couple of pulled muscles that took some weeks to recover, and did so on their own. But something like a herniated disc is pretty serious and honestly I'd defer to your doctor for the advice.

Bitt,

I'm sorry to hear that you're dealing with this. I have 5 ruptured discs in my back. One of them has been removed (L4-L5) in a lapendectomy procedure in 1991. I'm pretty familiar with this situation.

My understanding is that it is extremely unlikely that the cyatic pain will go away from any kind of physical therapy. It certainly didn't in my case. The pain comes from hydrostatic pressure of the jelly-like substance inside the ruptured disc leaking out and pushing against the nerve where it leaves the spial cord and goes to the leg. This pain can become quite severe and debilitating. In many cases, mine included, it gets worse and worse over time.

The disc will not heal itself.

I was in my last term of college when this happened to me, and I wanted to finish school, so I put off the surgery. The pain became more and more severe over a period of 5 or 6 weeks, and I experienced occasional partial paralysis. The paralysis and loss of bladder control scared me, to say the least. I had to accept that I couldn't finish the term and I needed surgery immediately.

I wish I hadn't waited because I have some permanent nerve damage from waiting. I can walk, etc. but the reflexes in my right leg are significantly slowed.

Here are some thoughts:

Both orthopedic and nerosurgeons perform the disc removal procedure. I have an extremely strong opinion that you should have the surgery performed by a nerosurgeon. You want to find one that specializes in disc injuries. I found one of the founders of the procedure (now retired) at the University of Minnesota and had mine done by him.

My first words upon waking from the anesthetic were "my leg doesn't hurt any more". It was *instant* and total relief from the cyatic pain. I was bed-ridden for about a week after the surgery, because you really can't move at all without involving your lower back.

There is a prosthetic disc that exists now that didn't when I had mine done. You should investigate this and see if you are a candidate for it.

Let me know if I can answer any other questions about the experience. I certainly don't know the technical details, but I can share my own experience with the condition.

Best,

Jim

Bitt

I'm also sorry to hear about your injury. I herniated a disc two years ago and for about three weeks the pain was so bad in my right leg I couldn't walk more than a few steps at a time. Over the following weeks the pain and numbness slowly eased up. I guess I was lucky but the pain did eventually go away on it's own and I never had to have any surgery. Hopefully this will be the case for you too.

John

Bitt, my wife's trouble started as a herniated disc. Because of her youth the doctors were VERY reluctant to do surgery. I forget all of the details, but they did some lesser surgery that made it better for a couple of years- then it came back in full force. At this point they did an xray and found that the disc was now in a state of degeneriation. I"m not sure if this is a normal progression for herniation (doesn't seem like it would be) and that's when they had to do the fusion. The fusion fixed the problem (and the leg pain), but unfortunatly had some nerve damage, which we are now trying (only somewhat succesfully) to treat.

Our experience seems to be on the more rare end of the spectrum, and like I said, I'm not sure how often a herniation leads to the kind of stuff that she experienced. But that is our story, FWIW.

I do second the invovlement of a neurosurgeon, though. We are only now getting a neurosurgeon invovled (the others were back specialist) to help with the pain management.

I had lumbar 3 discs in a row that were ruptured (the ohter two are between my shoulder blades), and the middle one was the one that was causing the nerve damage / pain / paralysis and had to be removed.

My surgeon told me that fusing would cause the other discs to get worse, since it basically transfers the load to the next highest joint. Alternatively, he could fuse 5 (!) vertebrae, but then I "wouldn't be able to tie my own shoes".

My guy removed the disc but didn't do any fusion. You may want to ask about this option, but I think it was a compromise in my situation. I was told I'd probably need more surgery later.

J

I haven't had my appointment yet -- later this week -- but what I've been told so far is that the surgery would probably be microdiscectomy, which, doing some research, looks to be a laparoscopic option where they remove the part of the disc that has squeezed out along with a little bone just for access. And they don't even cut muscle -- they can just kind of push it out of the way -- so postop pain should be lessened.

I'll let you guys know what I find.