Tuesday, December 09, 2008
An Unexpected Visitor
I don't know who it was that said "Pain is weakness leaving the body", but I have to wonder if their criteria included things like amputation, stabbing and slipped discs, or was the pain meter capping out at a stubbed toe?
Because they were full of shit, whoever they were. Pain is usually your body saying "Pay attention to me dumbass, I'm going through some severely traumatic shit and I'm taking you along for the cruise!"
I have a herniated disc in my lumbar spine, and for the past six years I have been able to manage it with small doses of ibuprofen, yoga and lower back support. Mostly, it was just tight in my lower back with the occasional momentary tweak every six months or so. Nothing I couldn't handle, and it usually didn't interfere with my lifestyle.
That came to a screeching halt three days ago.
I don't know what prompted it, I don't remember any strenuous activity taking place recently, but my lower back started a rolling pain on Sunday morning that built into a crescendo of agony by Sunday afternoon...Right after class. By evening, I was on the floor, taking whatever pills, booze or medicated pads we had that would stop the invisible knives being rammed into my back. The problem here is that the strongest thing we have in the house is my high-octane Nazi beer, and what I really needed were DRUGS.
Damn.
I haven't spent a night this interesting since a busload of cheerleaders from the local Asian Catholic Girl's school collided with a U.P.S. truck loaded with Vaseline in front off my house.
Firstly, there was no position I could lie in that didn't push into my spine and produce a stab of pain bad enough to elicit a scream out of me. (We're back onto my pain problem, for those of you who missed it. The cheerleaders are gone now.) After a few hours of turn-stab-scream, turn-stab-scream, I laid on the floor with a pillow in hopes of it maybe helping my back a bit.
If I ever write about this professionally, I'll call this chapter "It sounded like a good idea at the time". Laying on the floor severely exacerbated my problem, instead of a sharp pain every 15 - 20 minutes, I was now blessed with one every 3-5 minutes. Furthermore, since I had lost a large amount of mobility in my legs (I finally looked like some Silat people I know! *SNORT*) I was trapped on the floor with no way of getting my legs under me. It took about 10 minutes of white knuckle pain to finally stand up, and I used a ratty old cane we had in the house to assist me in what I'll charitably call walking. Since I induced the least amount of pain standing up, I decided I would do that as long as I could. I sure as hell wasn't getting any sleep.
I spent a few hours last night floating in the tub with the water as scalding hot as I could manage without boiling myself alive. Caren brought in a fresh pot of water to reheat my bath every 15 minutes, and I think the suspension helped out my back a great deal. I finally got some sleep last night after 48 hours of recurring pain. I had to sleep with a pillow tucked halfway under my back on one side, so the nerve wouldn't be aggravated, and it seems to have helped. My back is still tight this morning, but I do believe the swelling has gone down some.
I started looking into the various methods of back surgery...Nothing stands out. Looks like anything available at this point is 50-50 for being successful. I don't know how far I'll peruse that right now.
I have no idea what prompted this, like I said, nothing traumatic or exerting the past week. It just popped in like an unexpected relative showing up. The ones that eat all your food and break shit before you kick them out.
Never rains, but it pours.
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14 comments:
I have a blown L4-L5 disc for which I had to have a microdiscectomy.
What causes it is the spine manipulations. Or at least, it sure happened to me, and silat sure exacerbated the problem. When I talk about maybe dying from harimau, I'm not talking about Pa Herman twisting my spine into a pretzel. I'm talking about doing harimau and being in bed for a week.
Do NOT lie on the floor. You already realized that.
The only thing that helps me is to lie on my side with a long bodypillow, and a long pillow between my legs. This keeps my knees apart and for some reason this tends to straighten my spine. You can also get thick foam wedges designed for this. It works real good.
A big thing is walking. If you walk, it has a tendency to work out the kinks in your core muscles, for some reason.
Another thing is swimming or just floating in a pool. For some reason, this helps to an absurd degree. It makes the pain go away instantly, pretty much. Even if the pain came back when you get out of the water it would be a great deal. I'd be in there all day. But it doesn't.
You will most likely have to have surgery. But the surgery is very very easy compared to the pain. The surgery and the relatively mild but different ache of recovery is nothing compared to what you are currently experiencing.
Welcome to the world of really knowing lots about the spine.
One other thing: I stay the fuck away from yoga and back stretches. I WANT my shit inflexible there. Why? Because I want all the inflexibility I can get to prevent my spine from going to the point where real pressure is being put on the disks.
It's serious shit man, I wish you the best. When you get over this current suffering I have a couple of stretches and exercises that will help ease the stiffness.
One other thing: there is a certain unapproved medicine that works WONDERS.
Damn Bobbe, sorry to hear about your back acting up. I hope to heck you start feeling better real soon.
Some day I'll share the extruciatingly painful details of my diaphram spasming and locking up (4 days after shoulder surgery and I'm in a sling) and resulting agony of shallow breathing 50reps a minute for 2hrs (I was driving at first!) before I finally called the ambulance. Even the morphine and the valium the EMT's gave me didn't cut it. Oh, but they had good shit in the emergency room btw.
Maybe I'll have you write it, you seem to have a pretty good connection to pain now.
Although, I'm thinking Pippin has a good story.
Sorry to here of you Back problems, we hope you get better soon...
Kid --
Sorry to hear this.
Guru Plinck had the same problem, and he nursed it for years. Finally went and had the surgery done and within a few weeks, was way better than he'd been for a long time -- no pain.
My son-in-law is nursing the same problem now and they are deciding when to cut, since the PT hasn't done the job.
Success rates for L-spine surgeries have gone way in the last few years. Check into it.
Hey Bobbe ! Sorry your back is sore. I'll drop you a note somewhere on silat harimau sometime! Before you go straight off to surgery you might try some different things. First Cold packs always are better for acute back injuries as heat , while it feels good , actually enhances inflamation. This is why it feels good but later after removing the heat , later , people feel so much stiffer. In regard to stretches and PT , try a McKenzie protocol rather than just any yoga style stretching....this protocol is designed for reducing internal disc pressure and centralizing the discomfort from a disc herniation. Of course anti inflammatories, muscle relaxers and painrelievers can help you get by initially. Before I allow a surgery on myself, I'd first try an ESI ( Epidural Steroid Injection) or even an acupuncture treatment regimen. Back stabilization exercises/stretches focus on intrinsic muscles of the spine and have a different effect than "back exercises" done in the gym by weight lifters or stretches that globally "stretch the back" rather than focus on the small ligaments and muscles throughout the diferent levels. I'd see if you can side step surgical intervention first then make Mckenzie stretches part of your routine. When surgery truely is the answer, it is often the only answer . However, every surgical insult to the body bears with it some scarring and potential for other problems later on.
Hope you get better ASAP.
Doc
Go in for an MRI. They will be able to see exactly what is what.
I kinda tend to disagree with Doc. Judging by the level of pain you are describing, what has happened is that your disk ruptured a while ago, and calcified disk innards are now essentially pinching into the spine.
That piece is going to shift around in there. Sometimes it will hurt, other times it won't, but if you are doing any sort of silat (shoulder-to-shoulder postures, any kind of spine manipulation, any kind of twisting) you are going to exacerbate the problem.
I am not a believer in acupuncture at ALL. I would give it a "maybe" for things like muscle aches, but what you are dealing with here is essentially broken bone. Unless acupuncture is magic somehow and can make things like bone chips disappear, it's not going to help.
I also don't believe that epidural cortisone is going to help, for the same reason. If it was a bad pulled muscle, it might. If it's a ruptured disk, there's just no way, unless steroids can move bone chips back into the proper place.
"Guru Plinck had the same problem, and he nursed it for years. Finally went and had the surgery done and within a few weeks, was way better than he'd been for a long time -- no pain."
What the surgery will likely be for this issue is called a microdiscectomy. It is a minimally invasive procedure. It is so minimally invasive that they may want to do it as an in-and-out (not the kind where you wake up and your ass is sore, if that happens see a lawyer.) Stay in the hospital for as long as they will let you.
Basically what they do is put a tiny hole in your back, and put tiny instruments in there like dental picks. They will chop up the errant calcified cartilege and suck it out through a vacuum hose.
Since this is the part that is causing the pain, you will feel better almost immediately. It will be a different kind of pain, but now you know what real pain IS. The pain after surgery is like two weeks of nonstop mindblowing orgasm compared to what the pain is that you'll be experiencing until you have the surgery :(
What you want to make sure to do is to find out about the infection rate of the doctor. You might call a spine center and ask them who the doctor is who has the lowest infection rate.
The bad news is that if the pain is that bad, you will almost certainly have to have the surgery. The good (?) news is that by the time you elect to have the surgery you will be absolutely ecstatic about the idea.
BTW, one of the Suwanda family has a spinal fusion, where two vertebrae are fused together. Is this Shannon? She manages fine from what I understand.
Good luck with it, the pain is a real whore. Unbelievable until you experience it.
I had a lumbar lamanectomy for an L3-4 rupture when I was in college. I don't recommend that. Although I do hear that surgery has improved in the past 20 years, my general experience, confirmed by a doctor I know, is that surgery almost never makes things better, and almost always makes things worse. I strongly recommend you try _everything_ else before surgery.
Personally I find Scott Sonnen's IntuFlow and FlowFit, and the 5 Tibetans that Barnes talks about, work wonders for my back.
Hi Bobbe, One of my best friends injured his back halo jumping in the army. He never had surgery but had an inversion table to hang almost upside down and have gravity release the pressure on his spine. I've attached a link to a page I pulled while trying to find the exact name of the equipment. Hope it helps.
Anthony
http://www.healthyback.com/categories/inversion-tables/70
I have read, and find it believable, that most back and neck damage doesn't come from athletic activities but from relaxing afterwards, when you're too tired to maintain good posture and lean your weight on your elbows, etc.
This problem is more likely to have been caused at by sitting at the computer in the wrong position than by practicing silat. Sitting with a portion of your bodyweight focused on one spot along your spine, instead of being evenly spread down your spine, causing it to shear.
Maybe this will help, you'll know better than I if it's appropriate for your condition.
Sit in a chair, if you are able to sit up right now.
Relax, breathe, feel the weight of your head. Feel the weight of your shoulders and arms hanging at the top of your spine.
Can you feel the weight of your head,shoulders and arms pressing all the way down through your spine?
Does this weight press down all the way through your pelvis to the chair your sitting on, or does it skip out part way down your spine and hang like a hook from one of your vertabrae?
The weight of your arms, shoulders and head probably hangs like a hook from the damaged vertebrae, rather than pressing all the way to your pelvic bone.
Practice sitting in a chair. Explore body awareness in the at-rest position.
While relaxing, try to shift all of your weight onto your "sitting bones", even the weight of your legs. If your legs are bearing any of your body weight, that weight is not felt by your pelvis, and it causes shearing force higher up on your spine.
Become aware of the weight traveling down your spine like this while your sitting at the computer or at the dining room table or on the sofa.
Do this for a few minutes at a time, many times during the day.
Do the same thing standing, and walking, when you're able.
When you're standing and walking, feel the weight of your head, arms, and shoulders should still be felt by your ass. This weight should make your ass feel like the heaviest part of your body. You probably do this in silat practice, than slump out of it when your relaxing afterwards.
Maybe your vertebrae is too sensitive now to experiment with body-weight awareness, maybe shifting body weight around through your spine will put too much pressure on the damaged disc.
You'll know better than I if it's appropriate for you to try. But I wrote this hoping it MIGHT give you some relief.
Whatever you do, don't put weight on your elbows, ever!
BTW I could also name some faggy New Age-type practitioners in the area to try as an alternative to surgery, if you're open to that kind of thing. Email me if you are wanna try the road less taken.
For the price of a book and some exercise time, you might also try Pete Egoscue's method. I did it when I tore a calf muscle, and my nephew has gotten good results on his bad back.
If it doesn't work, it doesn't, but if it helps, it's cheap.
They have clinics here and there, but you can get a good idea from the basic book, the goal of which is to keep you up and moving instead of sprawled on your ass.
http://www.amazon.com/Egoscue-Method-Health-Through-Motion/dp/0060924306
I's send you my copy, but I gave it away already.
Screw surgery Bobbe..I have L-5..and L-6 yes L-6 due to my height and s-1 all ruptured due the car accident I survived...I was a walking or should I say crawling wreck..the docs wanted to do everything from fusing my spine to caging it etc..I said hell NO..if they cut you once it will be cut me 3 more times. I checked into Kettlebell training..Pavel on his site had many people saying how well kettlebells helped them rehab bad scrwed up backs..I tried it and guess what? It worked..I havent had a surgery or nothing and very little if any pain since 2006 when I started....They are worth a look at and a try...it worked for me and may work for you. There are many excerises that target the back for strength...ab work helps to...and no CHIMAY doesn't count as ab work..LOL...
go to www.dragondoor.com and ask around
"Never rains, but it pours"
And you live where?
I'd recommend Egoscue to as a form of self education.
I first read his book in 2000 after seeing my first ortho for my shoulder and getting the brush off. Took a long time to trust a Doc after that.
Egoscue was the first alternative method I researched and I still do some of his stuff.
Get his first original book, the rest are just more lengthy explanations.
The clinics and all are good but pricey. Just read the book. Knowledge is power.
Be very, very careful with kettlebells. It seems like different things work for different people, but kbells sure did not work for me, they hurt me real bad whenever I tried them so I don't do those swings any more.
Very likely you will find that there are two or three stretches that help you a great deal.
In my case, and likely in yours, tension in the hip flexor and weak back contribute to lower back problems.
For me, psoas stretches help greatly. You do these by getting basically in a front stance, or similar to one of your badan dasar postures but facing squarely along one of the arms of the "+". Then, you kind of lean forward, keeping your pelvis and body squared, so that you feel the stretch in the top front of the leg that is back. Then do it with the other leg.
Another exercise that helps is "supermans" where you get on all fours on the ground, as squarely as possible, and raise one leg behind you and raise the opposite arm so that both are parallel with the floor. Meanwhile, squeeze your abs and glutes.
Once again, from what you have said here, I'm not optimistic about the prospects of getting away without surgery. Don't do what I did and suffer horribly for a year before having surgery.
'Course, like I said everyone's injury is different, but if you're doing any kind of "alternative healing" (really too often a euphemism for unsupported woo-woo pseudoscience) remember that if nothing else they don't have the same type of scanning technology available to them that real doctors do.
Shortly before my surgery I walked into a chiropractor's office and when I left I had to call friends to carry me out and drive me home in the back of their pickup. I don't really remember it at all but apparently I was screaming.
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