Back Trouble

This is actually old news but since I don't have time to be super creative (wedding planning) and I claim this blog is to keep you updated on my life, I think its about time to pull this guy out.

About three months ago, I developed a pain in my right leg that felt like a pulled muscle and after two or three weeks, didn't really get any better. I decided to go in and see a doctor (first time in Wichita!) and, much to my surprise, he diagnosed this problem as a bulge in disc in my back.

Huh?

As I found out through some research, bulged discs can sometimes rub against the nerve traveling down the spinal column and cause pain to appear in the lower extremities. In my case, there was no injury in my right leg, that's just where the pain from the disc rubbing the nerve materialized. One easy way the doctor verified this was by checking my muscles in the area the pain was appearing for sensitivity (ie he poked and prodded them). Directly acting on the muscles that appeared to be the source of all the trouble didn't hurt but doing silly things like lifting my leg up and bending over did.

At first I was skeptical of his diagnosis (part of the reason I didn't go in as quickly) but he seemed to know what he was talking about so I played along. I started on some exercises, did a round of oral steroids, and the pain reduced noticeably. It didn't disappear, though, and that's when we decided to do an MRI to confirm the diagnosis.

MRIs are GREAT! I promise you, if you ever have a chance to get one done for free, take it. The process itself is painless (unless you're claustrophobic) and you get these amazingly cool pictures of the inside of your body. Well, at least I think they're cool. The MRI takes cross-section pictures of your body in a progressive fashion, slowly working its way through the area in question. The images themselves are 2-D but it doesn't take much of an imagination to see the changes in the body by looking at the pictures flip-book fashion. In fact, I did just that and made a little Quicktime movie.

(I can see why radiologists need special training. Even knowing which disc was bulged, it took me some time to identify it by looking at the pictures. I had to dig around on the internet and look at other sample pictures before I was able to ID it. Why don't you give it a crack with the picture below? I'll give you a hint: the bulge is between my L5 (lowest lumbar) and S1 (first "tailbone") vertebrae.)



As it turns out, my doctor was 100% correct: bulged disc/pinched nerve. Since the oral steroids didn't clear it up we next tried a month of physical therapy. Though I enjoyed the electrical massages and felt better for a while after each session, the overall progress was not that great. My last session was Dec. 23rd and my visit yesterday with my doctor confirmed that we would have to take the next step: epidural steroid injections. I'll be seeing a specialist in a few days and more than likely, I'll be getting a needle stuck in my back to manually inject a dose of steroids at the effected location to see if that will reduce the inflammation and reduce the bulge in the disc.

So that brings you up to speed on me. If you're the praying type, pray that this gets cleared up soon. The pain is starting to get very annoying (I'm actually starting to take ibuprofen on a daily basis) and it would be great if this didn't slow down the wedding/honeymoon. I'm hopeful and know that God's got it under control no matter what happens.