On January 7, 2012, a slight bulge in my tailbone (L5, for anyone keeping score) caused a massive flare-up with my sciatic nerve, and I have had to endure considerable pain, loss of feeling, and neuropathy in my back and left leg/foot ever since. I’ve had surgery, numerous epidural injections, chiropractic and acupuncture treatments, and taken more opioids, gabapentin, and pain relievers than anyone should in a lifetime.
In short, this has made life difficult, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. In shorter, it’s shite.
Took me 5 years to get a grip and start losing weight/exercising. This helped me ween off the Norco (major accomplishment), but I still had to take gabapentin religiously to help calm the nerve flare ups that still occur through the day and when I (try to) sleep. After a year of working on it, I spent another 3 putting that weight back on, as resignation and depression worked me over.
Over this past year, I’ve worked hard on my weight problem, physical/mental conditioning, and am rebuilding my life after separating from my wife and moving back to my childhood home in Long Beach, which has allowed me to vastly improve my relationships with my sons, family, as well as being blessed to start a new one 6 months ago with Nikol Conant. All this change has had created some success in alleviating some of the daily pain, but the flare-ups do continue to remind me of their authority often enough.
Since moving here, I’ve started working with new pain management doctors, who have been encouraged by the effort I’ve put in to correct the problem. They’ve tested, proved, and prodded me in new ways, to see if we can tame the beast, but it just continues to breathe fire.
All that said, I continue to be motivated and hopeful/prayerful that something will finally break the cycle. The latest development is that I’m having a spinal cord stimulator partially implanted in my back this week, which has been successful in treating sciatica in others. If this works, I’ll go in for full implant of the device, and become a bionic man. Or, at least someone who can know life without pain - at least for a while.
Dear Lord, I need this.
