The Herniated Disc
It didn’t take much for my entire life to flip upside down. When it did, I wasn’t prepared to navigate the immense suffering that lay waiting for me on the other side.
In 2017, I had been a personal trainer for 7 years, teaching Strength and Conditioning in boutique studios, when my L4-L5 disc herniated during a small group class. I’d bent over to pick up a small 5 lb weight, a seemingly innocuous motion compared to the deadlift and squatting movements I had regularly been doing.
Knowing that something had gone seriously wrong, I canceled the class and gingerly hobbled out to my SUV. I sat down and leaned forward to place a small rolled up t-shirt behind my back.
That’s when the full rupture occurred.
A “squirting” sensation burst from my lower back, directly in the middle of my spine. Pain, truly indescribable and incomparable to anything I’d ever experienced, erupted from my spine and shot waves of electric pain into my feet.
I reflexively tried to get out of the car. I tried to swing my legs out of the car, but they wouldn’t budge. My momentum carried me enough that I started to fall out of the car door. Effectively paralyzed, in complete shock, I hung from the top of my driver side door with both hands. I screamed for Siri to call my fellow trainers who were going about their daily work routines inside.
Hearing the agony in my voice when they answered my call, two fellow trainers/friends rushed out of the gym to find me in an absolute hysteria, hanging on to the car door.
They put both of my arms on their shoulders and grabbed my legs and hauled me out to one of their cars.
What followed is quite frankly a blur. Medication numbed my mind and body as I laid on the floor of my one-bedroom house, right where my trainers had left me.
Barely able to push myself onto my hands and knees, I peed in water bottles for the next 3 days.
Slowly, I regained movement, and the pain subsided a bit, but I was still in agony.
An MRI later that month confirmed that my L4-L5 disc had sequestered into the spinal canal. It was going to take months, if not years, for this injury to completely heal.
A month later, I began physical therapy. I had high hopes and did everything the PT asked me to do. I was told that my “glutes [were] inactive”. But the more I tried the PT’s exercises pain only seemed to get worse. No matter how engaged I was able to get my glute muscles, the back pain persisted.
After completing a round of PT, I began searching for another physical therapist. When that provided me no results, I found a chiropractor. Every practitioner I saw told me “you’re too young to have this type of injury.” Later, I found out how wrong they were- disc herniations are extremely common in young adults. Had I known this bit of information, I might have shy’d away from clinicians who eagerly proclaimed this as fact.
The chiropractor(s) that I saw were keen on adjusting me every time I came in, and they didn’t seem to know how to help me resolve my issue. While adjustments seemed to give me temporary relief, teaching my entire body how to move again wasn’t their priority.
That winter, I fell into a dark depression. My entire life had been turned upside down. Once a courageous young man, capable of seemingly anything, I had become the antithesis of that person. The girlfriend I had started dating right before my injury was becoming increasingly frustrated with my disability. Getting in the car to go on road trips caused me great anxiety- sitting for any amount of time caused extreme pain. My sexual capacity was extremely diminished, and my once joyful self started slowly draining away. I began to have suicidal thoughts the further I spiraled into pain. Seemingly no one knew how to help me cure the dysfunctions that lead to my disc rupture.
I began to dive deeper into the “movement as medicine” field, taking classes with clinicians in courses with titles like “Lumbar Disc Rehabilitation”. I read everything I could get my hands on to further my knowledge in this field. I partnered with Chiropractors, Physical therapists, D.O’s, massage therapists, and acupuncturists to broaden my knowledge while simultaneously gaining access to various modes of treatment.
None of those modalities gave me lasting results. Most practitioners I met focused on the area of pain (my low back) as the area that was causing the problem.
It wasn’t until I found a coach who helped me broaden my perspective on how the body works that things began to change.
When I stopped viewing the body as the sum-of-its-parts and started thinking about whole-body systems, I finally felt a shift.
Now, working with this methodology for the last two years, I’ve been able to give my body an opportunity to heal, and I’ve been able to share this perspective with the various clients I work with.
I now see my injury as the greatest gift the universe could have given me- an opportunity to slow down and a chance to learn to listen to the messages my body had been sending me for many years. I hope that hearing a bit about my story with chronic pain and learning to navigate it can be helpful to you in your process. If you’d like to learn more, book an initial appointment with me and I’ll help guide you along your path to healing, too.