Advice on disc protrusion

[monkey]

Hi sonj,
Sorry to hear you are bad again. Loads of issues here.
Main question: why did you have further treatment from the Chiropractor if you were feeling so good? I do believe that he has helped you more than anyone else up to now, but you get to a point when natural recovery is best. There is a risk in manipulating a disc protrusion.
As I said previously, the majority of people with disc problems have flair ups of symptoms. Standard advise would be to give yourself a couple of weeks (don't panic the initial severe pain should start to settle), if you are not starting to improve after 2 weeks try and get another epidural as this did help you last time.
Disc protrusion into the end plate is relatively common and may have happened to you previously. This usually happens when the end plate is weaker than the annulus. It is often an incidental finding and can be seen when there is a previous history of Scheuermanns disease and are described as Schmorl's nodes. However, Scheuermanns usually does not effect lower lumbar spine. Schmorls nodes are often asymptomatic and I would not worry about this finding on you MRI.
Give yourself a few days for the intense pain to subside and then try and get up and mobile again. Please don't let this flair up cause you to get all that fear back, you are likely to recover and if you are not recovering then you still have the option of the epidural.

[Sonj]

Thankyou, on day 3 now and I am still lying here unable to walk ( I have liquid morphine for the pain and it is helping only a little. I try to get up onto my knees are crawl around every so often and also pull my legs up as before to try and get some mobility. I tried to stand up again a while ago and managed to take 4 steps but had to go back down again as the pain is excruciating. The chiro came to my house and gave my back a very gentle massage and used some vibrating machine thing on my back which he said should ease any muscle spasm and it was very soothing. My friend also gave me some acupuncture yesterday and when the needle went into my sacrum the pain went away completely straight away, but it came back again as soon as the needle came out. I was still seeing the chiro once a month just for maintanance sort of thing and when I left the other day he was happy for me to go away for 6 weeks.

I have a friend who is coming down every day to get me food and empty a chamber pot which I am having to use, all rather humiliating but there you go.

My GP advised me that if the pain did not settle again I would have to get back in touch with the hospital. My main worry is that I go for another injection and eventually I need to have another one again. I have been told I can only have 6 injections. I am scared that even after having 6, I may just be delaying the enivitable of needing surgery. I thought flare ups were meant to be less painful than the original injury, but this is far far worse.

Re the schmorl node thing. The chiro reckoned that when I originally injured my spine it is possible that I fell onto my bottom (which I did do a few weeks before the pain started) and this compressed my spine so badly that the disc ruptured. As well as protruding laterally onto the nerve root, he said it would have protruded upwards, fracturing the L5 vertebrae. Obv this has healed ages ago and he said this is what the denting is that has shown on the MRI. Of no significance now obv if it was a fracture as it would have healed a long time ago, but I was curious nonetheless.

My daughter will be coming home on Monday and I am still incapable of caring for her and unsure of what it is going to happen now. A few weeks ago I said I wouldn't get another steroid jab as I hated the side effects but by god I would happily put up with the side effects to stop this pain