Posted 12/11/2013 10:56 PM (GMT 0)
So, I have been going back and forth the past few weeks as to whether or not I feel like the surgery was worth the bother. Not that it really matters at this point because what's done is done. For the most part I haven't felt terribly different than I did pre-surgery. In fact up until monday afternoon I felt pretty much identical to how I did pre surgery.
I wasn't in a terrible amount of pain pre surgery, my back went out terribly bad in August, it put me out for about 5 days, hurt to even breathe, it was the worst pain I had ever felt. In the weeks after between going to the doctor, doing the MRI dance etc... The pain subsided a great deal, I wasn't pain free but it was back to kind of a familiar level of pain if that makes sense. I have had lower back pain for the better part of a decade so by this point my tolerance for it really is binary, it's either - My back hurts and I'm functional but grumpy, or it hurts so bad that I'm looking for a bus to jump in front of. There isn't really much of a scale.
So, post the big blowout I had some numbness and apparently loss of strength in my left foot. That had never happened before so I figured it was time to actually get things looked at which led to the surgery.
Heres the thing. I still have numbness and I still have loss of strength and my back still feels pretty much exactly the same as it did before Oct 29. So I have been pretty frustrated.
Monday I think I turned a corner, maybe, I dunno. I had this weird tingling/cold feeling in my left toe pretty much all weekend and into monday, which is different than the normal numbness that's there. Ok, so that was new. Switched over to Ibuprofen on monday afternoon and it seemed to make all the difference in the world, a good portion of the numbness is gone, the pain in my lower back has died down a fair bit and I feel like I can move around infinitely better. I duno if the cold tingling was the nerve waking back up a bit, but I'll take it I guess.
So I'm working on the assumption that there is still a fair amount of inflammation around the nerve that is causing the pain and such that I'm experiencing. With the changes over the last few days now I'm mostly just sore from PT and have a weird intermittent stabbing pain on the right side of my shin that wasn't there before. *shrug* dunno. I still have the loss of strength in my foot, but it really only manifests itself when the PT or doctor actually check it as far as walking around and moving I can do everything I normally do, so I dont know exactly what that means. I do know that laying down, or removing the load from my spine almost instantly causes a fair bit of the strength in my foot to return.
PT has been great, I'm back to not having a weight restriction but have been warned not to go crazy and ig something hurts stop (Duh... you went to school to tell me that?) As well as not doing any twisting or anything with any kind of weight yet. That's from the PT. I kinda wish the surgeon and her assistant were more... useful but they have been pretty lame when it comes to any kind of information or being at all helpful with this. Great surgeon, highly recommended but the rest of the interactions with them have been pretty terrible.
So yeah TLDR; 6 weeks out, was feeling meh till monday now feeling like something has clicked and much improved.