#bulging disc

My back hurt. The spot right in my lower back where your back meets your hips, right alongside either side of my spine (in between L5 and S1 vertebrae if you wanna be technical and know your spine quite well. I did not yet. I just knew that was The Spot Where It Hurt).

Which was nothing unusual. It’s hurt since I was eighteen (I was thirty-one at this time). And I’d spent the past days and weeks packing and moving boxes full of my life to the new house. Of course it hurt. (Yes, I’d had movers do most of it, but I’d still done the majority of the packing and there were some boxes and things that I didn’t trust to the movers). 

But now it was done. All the boxes were moved into the new house, the important things were unpacked- kitchen, books, DVDs. The latter two may not seem important to most people, but when you have twenty-two boxes of books (the movers said it was the most boxes of books they’ve ever moved and I was quite proud), and three or four boxes of DVDs (yes, I still have DVDs), unpacking them clears a lot of space.

I’d survived another week at work, going home each afternoon and unpacking more boxes until I couldn’t handle moving any more and then retreating to the couch. I’d already decided to give myself the weekend off from unpacking this weekend, just to rest.

“A whole day in bed only getting up for food or the bathroom will just give my back a chance to rest,” I’d decided. 

So that’s what I did on Saturday. 

On Friday night, I’d moved my laptop and my little portable laptop table upstairs and didn’t get up except for food or the bathroom. Or to heat up my heat bag. Which despite having a TV in my bedroom and doing much the same things I would be doing downstairs sprawled on the couch, was super boring. 

When I woke up on Sunday, I was bitterly disappointed that my day of rest had not magically cured my back pain. 

My next hope for a miracle cure was a hot shower. Just standing there beneath the hot water. I don’t remember if I attempted to wash my hair or not. I know I didn’t try to shave my legs- I’d done that on Friday night in the shower. It hurt to bend over, so I’d had the bright idea just to squat and shave my legs that way. Which worked until it hurt too much to stand, and there was nothing in my shower I could grab to pull me up. 

I’d honestly thought that I’d have to crawl out of the shower on my hands and knees to the toilet and use that to get myself up. Luckily, I managed to stand eventually. I don’t remember how now. 

So I wasn’t going to attempt that again. 

I got out of the shower and got myself dressed slowly. Putting pants on also was a thing, because raising my knee to my chest hurt. I don’t remember the Before, but I know After the only way for me to get pants on was to lie on my back and put my pants on that way, like some kind of weird turtle. For some reason, it didn’t hurt to raise my knee while lying on my back, only when standing or sitting. 

I decided that I was bored with bed, and that Sunday’s rest could be accomplished downstairs on the couch. Easier access to the kitchen. 

I’d made the trip with the laptop and laptop table upstairs on Friday night in one trip, so I assumed the return trip could also be done only in one trip. The laptop table was on the floor, laptop on top, so I knelt down to lift it.

And then there was Pain. 

Blinding, hot, white pain in all directions from The Spot in my back. It reached all the way up to my arms- to the point that I dropped the laptop table because I couldn’t grip it with my hands. I remember just praying that I hadn’t broken the laptop, because I did not have the money to replace it just now, not to mention everything I would lose on it, if I had (the laptop is fine, just FYI). 

A note I didn’t mention is that I’d bought a new bed for the new house, but it hadn’t arrived yet (Fun Fact: it would not arrive until February. It was November). So I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor. 

Upon which I now fell like I was a stunt person diving into a crash mat. My whole back was spasming, and I was seeing black spots. 

I lay there gasping for breath and taking slow and steady breaths, hoping I wasn’t about to either pass out (given that I live alone and have never passed out before) or throw up (because that is just very unpleasant and I wasn’t sure how I’d make it to the toilet for that). 

I only knew two things then:

This was not my normal back pain.

Something was very, very wrong. 

I eventually got up. I feel like I might have tried to get up and had another spasm, I don’t remember now. I do know that when I did get up, I had to be on my stomach and then get up onto my hands and knees and somehow stood up that way. 

I made my way slowly downstairs, got down onto the couch and then realised that I didn’t think I’d be able to get up again. 

I debated whether or not to call an ambulance. But I didn’t feel like this was an emergency enough for that. 

So I called a colleague who lives a few streets away, who I didn’t think would mind coming to help me. But she didn’t answer. 

So I called my friend, who I work with but lives on the other side of town, some 30-40 minutes away depending on traffic. She answered and said she was just wrapping Christmas presents. 

Me: (paraphrasing because I don’t remember my exact words) Can I ask a big favour? I’ve done something to my back, and I can’t really move and I don’t think I can drive myself to the hospital.

Thankfully, she and her partner came ASAP.

The hospital is like a five minute drive from my house (another reason I wasn’t super keen to call an ambulance; even for that small a distance, the ambulance bill is a few hundred dollars. I do have ambulance cover in my health insurance, but still… I could move. So, I could get to the hospital myself- well, almost by myself. Inconveniencing my friend seemed the better option than inconveniencing the paramedics, who may be needed at an actual emergency, right?). 

I couldn’t walk very fast and bending down hurt, but we got me into the car. I needed help putting on my seatbelt because I couldn’t turn, nor could I reach out to pull the door closed.

I can’t really describe the pain succinctly that I felt from sitting down just for that five minute drive. It was kind of a pressure in The Spot, one that radiated down into my legs and also up. But it also kind of felt like a lock, like the spine was locking into place. It got heavier the longer I sat, until I was sure that if I sat any longer, I’d no longer be able to get up. 

Getting into the hospital was fine. I walked slowly. Although I remember my foot catching slightly on some uneven pavement and I stumbled and that was a sharp jolt up my spine. 

The triage nurse invited me to sit when it was my turn, and I had to say “no, I can’t.”

It was a wait of… maybe an hour? I don’t know. Long enough for me to feel bad that my friends were giving up their Sunday to sit with me. I think I offered to let them go, if they wanted but they stayed (in hindsight, thank God they stayed). The triage nurse did bring me some pain meds, but I didn’t feel like they did much and so I stayed standing. 

I didn’t sit again until I got in to see the doctor. I told him everything, and he said it was a muscle spasm. 

“Rest. Heat. I’ll give you a script.”

It didn’t feel like a muscle spasm, but I am not a doctor, so what do I know? 

I was only sitting for a minute or two by then, but once he left to get me the meds, I had to stand. Again, it was that feeling of “If I don’t stand right this minute, I’m not going to be able to get up.” Getting up wasn’t easy, but I did it. 

I went back to my friends and told them, so we decided to swing by the shop to fill the script before returning home. Again, the shop is a maximum five minute drive from the hospital and my house. When I can move, I’m able to walk it in 20-30 minutes. 

But by the time we pulled up to the front of the building (it was decided to drop me off before parking the car, because the parking spots are not the widest and it was a busy spot, my back was on fire. 

I have no idea how long we sat there, but eventually I managed to kind of sideways shuffle out of the car. There was a safety pole nearby (pictured above) and I kind of fell onto it, because I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t straighten up. 

It was the end of November, so it was warm but not quite summer yet. I was wearing thin sweatpants, a long sleeved t-shirt and a light cardigan. And I felt so warm, standing there hunched over that pole and I was seeing spots again. I remember staring at the concrete floor and just wanting to lie down on it- not a thought I regularly have about a dirty floor outside. 

My friends got me a shopping cart to lean on, and we headed (well, shuffled) inside. I couldn’t do more than shuffle. I think we got about thirty feet inside? And I just couldn’t walk anymore. 

My local shops, rather than hard benches, have soft ottomans in the middle of the aisles for people to sit on (pictured above) . There was one right near us, and it looked comfy. I worked out that I could shuffle sideways with a lot less pain, so we did that while we waited for the ambulance to arrive and managed to lie on it. Which helped a lot with the pain. 

When the paramedics arrived, they gave me one of those green whistles, which has Penthrox in it (drugs. Good drugs). I’ve seen them used on those TV ambulance shows and Bondi Rescue, and I’d seen people get all relaxed and kinda high on them, so I trusted that they worked. To be honest, I don’t remember feeling much of a difference. 

But they got me onto the stretcher and then into the ambulance. Every jostle hurt my back. 

To be honest, the ER wasn’t that much more helpful this time than they’d been half an hour earlier when I’d left. I saw the same doctor, and it was clear that he still thought it was a muscle spasm. But because I could not move, they couldn’t send me home this time. 

So they gave me pain meds. Really good pain meds. 

By that night, I could gingerly roll onto my stomach, but I couldn’t get onto my hands and knees. 

There were no beds available in the ward, so they moved me to the maternity ward for the night. The best night sleep I had in the hospital, honestly. 

I feel like the story gets quite boring from here, to be honest, so I’ll sum it up pretty quick. Hospitals are very boring places. And I was in a room with people who were also in pain and made a lot of noise (I am a “suffer in silence” type for the most part). They were very concerned about my bladder (because you know, back injuries), but because I couldn’t get up to use the bathroom, their next idea was a bedpan. 

This next part may be TMI, but the point of me writing this is to demonstrate what this was like, so… yeah. Otherwise, skip this paragraph. First of all, lifting my hips to get the bedpan underneath was hell. My right hip felt like… you know when you fall asleep on your hand or something and it goes numb and you can’t move it? It was like that. Except it wasn’t numb, because I could feel it. It just didn’t want to lift when my brain told it to (For the next two months if I wanted to roll onto my left side, I had to put my hands under my right hip and physically lift it myself). The bedpan was a no-go (apparently not uncommon in people my age) so the next step was a catheter. Also super fun and not mortifying at all. 

On Monday, when I still couldn’t move, they said they’d give me an MRI the next day. So I didn’t do much on Monday. They had me on endone, which made my head all fuzzy, so I probably dozed most of the day. Maybe read (thank goodness for my Kindle app). The thing about hospitals is that it’s a very lonely place, despite you constantly being surrounded by people. And the timing of my injury (ie. the end of the school term) meant everyone I know in town was busy and burnt out, so I felt bad asking anyone to come visit me. I’d kinda hoped my parents would offer to come down and see me, but they didn’t. And to be fair, I didn’t ask them. Mostly because if they’d said anything but “yes” I would have broken down, and I was doing an excellent job (I felt at least) at holding myself together. 

Tuesday I had the MRI, and shock horror- it wasn’t a muscle spasm. It was a bulging disc, between my L5 and S1 vertebrae. Pictured here (note- the pic isn’t my actual spine, it is from Google. Because no one in the past year has ever thought I should be able to see my own injury, apparently. But it’s the same injury in the same spot). Where the black bit in between the vertebrae has bled out into the light grey bit? Yeah, it’s not supposed to do that. 

So that explained all the pain. The hospital physio came and saw me and said that this is pretty common injury, no reason I shouldn’t recover fully, but also that it could cause problems further down the line, namely if I ever get pregnant. So yeah… another reason I won’t be doing that. 

By Wednesday I was able to stand. Kind of. Slowly and it hurt, and I needed help, but the physio was able to get me on my feet briefly. The thing I learned then was that it was easier for me to get up when the bed was high, but much easier for me to get down when the bed was lower. I don’t know why, but there’s probably a reason for it. I already knew that any adjustments to the bed had to be done slowly- we learned that the hard way, after several nurses tried to help by adjusting the bed to either sitting up or lying down. I got out of hospital on Thursday, once I could stand and walk well enough that I could take care of myself at home (namely, getting up and down stairs and in and out of bed).

I had some very helpful friends from work who helped me with things at home- groceries, errands, etc. I needed help to do laundry, because I couldn’t lift the hamper, nor could I bend down to get the clothes out of the washing machine once they’d been washed and hang them out on the clothesline. Colleagues and friends who are willing to help you do laundry are the real MVPs. 

Christmas was the other worry. My family lives 3-3.5 hours from me, and Christmas is always held at my sister’s place. I’d missed Christmas in 2020 because of COVID, so the idea of missing another family Christmas wasn’t ideal. When I originally mentioned this to my parents, they said “you’ll just have to drive really slowly and take a lot of breaks. So maybe it will take you six hours instead of three.” I wasn’t keen on that idea, especially because my right leg and hip was an especially painful area. I mentioned it to my doctor, and she said “you should not be driving anywhere that far right now. As a passenger with lots of breaks, maybe. Not as a driver.”

And my parents’ response to that was “oh, well I guess we’ll have to sort something out then” and when I suggested it might just be easier for me to stay home, then guilted me for not coming home for Christmas “again”. It was eventually decided that my dad would drive down and collect me and then drive me back home after Christmas. 

I was only home for a few days, and my family also made me feel bad about how short my stay was. But, my brother and one of my sisters both live at home, so when I visit my parents I sleep on the couch in the sunroom and my brother has a dog who loves to jump on people. Neither of these things are great with a back injury. 

With a bulging disc injury, the main thing for recovery is time. Which I am not great with. I started physio on my back in January, and finished in July- at least for now. I ended up seeing a new physio for this. I’d been seeing one (for a different issue), but she went on maternity leave at the same time this happened, and her replacement… I saw her three times between leaving the hospital and Christmas, and she wouldn’t touch my back and just talked a lot about how pain was mostly in our heads and was tied to our emotions. The third time, it was a bad day and all she kept telling me was to sit with the pain and breathe through it. Screw that. 

I did a Google search and found another local physio who did remedial massage, who miraculously had an appointment free the next day. I saw her, shuffled into the room and she took one look at me and said “yep, it’s your sciatica.” She gave me a massage and at the end, I could actually walk out of the room, almost normally. She recommended another physio in the practice who could help my injury, and that’s who I saw for the next seven months. 

I wore heels for the first time in September and could have cried because it felt normal (although I was very careful). My back still gets stiff and tight a lot quicker than it did, especially if I’m sitting for long periods or walking for long periods (but it did that before too). I think I’m more just aware of it all now.