Nearly six years later I give birth to my second child. This time I am 28. He's a few months old and again I start having the pain in my right butt cheek and down my leg. This time it is excuriating and much worse. I lie in the floor in child's pose and crawl around to try to get relief. This time we are living in Colorado and I
have to walk my older son to and from Kindergarten every day. I do it but it is awful. I go back to the doctor and they call it sciatica again and prescribe Motrin and physical theapy. I'm suffering. I go to the physcial therapy office and they make me wait several days to get in. They do the same thing as before, heat, massage and ultrasound. It does not help at all. My mother is extremely ill with leukemia and I fly back to Georgia with the baby. I remember carrying him through the airport limping and tearing up in pain trying to make it to the baggage area to meet my family. I began living on Tylenol and Motrin. I would take each medication every four hours to be able to function. My mother passed away and I was still in pain. I never did go back to physcial therapy, it did no good. Eventually the pain went away after nearly four months.
Over the course of the next three years I would have flare ups of sciatica. Sometimes I could pinpoint what set it off. Once it was from sitting in the front seat of the car for several hours at the drive-in. Another time I sat on the ground for an hour for an outdoor concert and that set it off. Other times it would just happen and I would suffer for several days to a week with it. I finally learned that if I stretched by lying on my back and pulling my leg to the opposite side it would stretch out my piraformis muscle and keep the pain at bay.
In 2009 we lived in Virginia and I gave birth to my third child, I was 31. She was in a breech presentation late into the pregnancy so I began going to the chiropractor to help get her to turn. She did and I had a much easier delivery with her. After her birth I began going to the chiropractor fairly regularly after a bad flare up and a visit to my regular doctor. The x-rays he took reveled a narrowing of the spine and degenerative disc disease. He reffered me to the chiropractor, of which of course insurance wouldn't cover. I went regularly and we were able to keep the sciatica from flaring up for the most part.
Thursday, May 13th my Mother in law was visiting while my husband was deployed. I sat on the couch (I usually did not sit on the couch because soft surfaces would sometimes cause a flare-up) and nursed my daughter that evening. When I got up I was hurting. I knew immediately it was not good. The next morning I went to the chiropractor. It did not feel as good as it usually did. Usually I could tell a difference right away. This time it was still bothering me. I took some ibuprofen and went on with the day. That night I sat in a tub of hot water and felt much better. Saturday I was feeling pretty good. We went strawberry picking and to the beach. I did pick some strawberries, but was careful not to lean over too much. I lay on the beach and just relaxed. Later that evening I felt worse. I had ate too much and coughed a bit to vomit, when I did I felt some excrusiating horrible pain in my back. I didn't cough a whole lot, it was just a little bit. I thought if I got in the tub again it would feel better since it worked the night before. I got in the tub and it did no good. When I stood up to get out of the tub I felt numb. I was numb all in my buttocks and pelvis and down my left leg and foot. I freaked out! I woke up my mother-in-law and we went to the ER. I was hurting bad.
When I arrived to the ER they took me right back. All they heard was "pain" and gave me pain medication. It did nothing to help. I cannot describe how much I was hurting. They made comments like, "You need an MRI." but wouldn't get me one. They said I needed to see my doctor on Monday. I wish they would have just did the MRI. They were trying to hurry me out. They gave me the pain meds and wanted it to hurry up and take effect so they could send me home. I was trying to get off the exam table to leave (even though I was still in extreme pain) and I had the biggest muscle cramp ever in my left butt cheek. My mother-in-law P got the nurse and they came back in. They gave me another pain medicine and it slowly got a little better. They wrote me some prescriptions and sent me home. I was miserable. I went to bed.
The next morning my mother-in-law had to fly back to Georgia. My dear neighbor got my prescriptions filled for me. I was taking a pain medicine and a muscle relaxant. I was flat on my back in bed. My older two boys were fine, but my daughter went next door with the neighbor. I was not feeling right at all.
I went to the doctor on Monday evening. He looked at my chart and saw the x-ray from before and said, "oh yes, you have degenerative disc disease and you need to go to an orthopedist and they can help you. In the mean time take some steriods and the inflamation will go down and you will get feeling back." I questioned him over and over about the numbness. He assured me it would go away once the inflmation went away. I believed him.
Tuesday I forced myself up and took the kids to the military base to apply for passports. We were planning a move to Italy and I had to do all this paperwork while my husband was deployed. On the drive up to the base my left leg had awful spasms and intense pain. Looking back I think that was when the nerves completely died. After that I didn't have anymore pain. When I returned home I went to the bathroom and discovered that I had wet myself. After having had three vaginally delivered, large children I had minor stress incontincence, but this I didn't even feel happen. I also realized that I had not had a bowel movement since I couldn't feel anything down there. I was scared. My grandparents were flying in that night so I just held out until they came in. I had two other episodes of urinary incontinence.
Wednesday, May 18th. I dropped my son to preschool and my grandfather drove me back to my doctor. I saw a PA and explained all of the symptoms to him. He was very concerned. He formerly worked in an ER and did a couple of neurological tests on me. He asked me to stand on my tiptoes and I couldn't. That's when he said, "Damn. You are going to need surgery, now." He sent me to the ER again.
I arrived close to 10:30am to the ER. I received two MRI scans. One without contrast and one with. By 7PM I was in the operating room. The neurosurgeon came to see me before surgery and showed me the MRI images. He said, "You have a huge mass here. I cannot tell if it's a ruptured disc or a mass like a tumor. I can go in and remove it and find out. If I don't do surgery now, you won't get any better." Of course I decided to have surgery. During all this time not one person actually mentioned Cauda Equina Syndrome. The surgeon kept saying I would make a full recovery in time and I would be fine. I believed him.
No comments:
Post a Comment