Like many people reading this blog, along with bulging discs and Spinal Stenosis, I have Degenerative Disc Disease. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how this contributes to my overall level of chronic pain, but generally speaking, DDD causes a lot of stiffness and instability. I wake up with an achey lower back, and spend most of my day trying to minimize the amount of bone on bone (vertebrae – L5/S1) pounding it takes.
In May of 2015, the Sciatic pain down my left leg was so intense that I couldn’t get out of bed for three weeks. I had surgery for a herniated disc (the root cause of Sciatica) at L4/L5 in June of 2015, and here’s an update a year and a half later.
“If you took 100 people off the street and gave them MRIs, a third of them — even if they had no back pain whatsoever — would have obvious structural problems,” says Dr. Charles Rosen, M.D., clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine.
Wellness and mindfulness are definitely buzzwords these days that tap into an eastern philosophy of establishing awareness on the present moment. After cycling through surgeries, medicines and traditional forms of Western therapies, I’ve begun exploring yoga, meditation and natural remedies and so far, these alternative approaches to healing have had a positive impact on how I manage chronic pain.
