Shirley Manson found God in tramadol, but all I got was this lousy pain in the butt.
I’ve always had issues with my leg, whenever I’ve done weight training or intense cycling. If I don’t do enough preventative stretching, or sometimes even if I do, the muscles in my butt tighten up and start causing leg pain, lower back pain, sometimes a little sciatica. I thought that’s what was happening this time, but instead of getting better it just kept getting worse.
It started fairly innocuously, a bit of tightness in the leg. Soreness when I tried to stretch it out, mostly manifesting as lower back pain. After a couple of weeks of not getting better I went to see the physio for some massage and a program of stretches. It helped. Movement helps. Once I’ve warmed up, I’m doing great. But every night things would reset.
There was no one thing that caused it, but driving to my parents place didn’t help. My car isn’t uncomfortable, but sitting in the driving position for 4 hours at a time still really aggravates things. I kept up my physio program while I was up there, but the drive back just made things worse again.
Then on Sunday I thought I’d take a little bike ride. Nothing intense, just to get some movement, you know? The thing that helps?
Well it didn’t.
That night was agony. I’ve never had pain quite like it. Neural pain. The kind that you can’t touch; there’s no particular spot it hurts, it’s just everywhere and nowhere all at once. Waves of fire without the heat, giving way to a hellish TV static of misfiring nerves where the best you can do is tune to the least offensive channel. Settling for a pervasive ache that never quite goes away.
On the first few nights the only relief I could get was standing up. Ironically, sitting or laying would make everything arc up, but to get some relief I would wander around upright in my darkened living room until the tiredness got the better of me. As you can imagine, it’s not a good position to sleep in, so I didn’t get any.
I’d been self-medicating with ibuprofen since I figured an anti-inflammatory would help, but it didn’t really. So on Tuesday I went to the doctor and he prescribed tramadol, a scary sounding opiate that turned out to not do very much of anything at all.
I’ve been to the physio a few times now and the doctor largely agreed with his diagnosis of piriformis syndrome: a condition where the piriformis muscle in the butt gets angry and pinches the sciatic nerve. But since it can also be caused by more scary spinal issues he sent me for a CT scan to rule that out. It’s almost 4:00 a.m. now so that means my follow-up appointment in about 5 hours, and I’m looking forward to the possibility of a steroid injection to chill things right the fuck out. I hear good things.
In the meantime I’m laying here on the couch with my heat pad turned up to 5. I thought I was improving because yesterday was fantastic, but then I woke up to that pervasive jangly fire-not-fire down my leg. And it’s not that the drugs don’t work. It’s just that they transmogrify the pain instead of entirely killing it. Like the upgrade from analogue to digital; the signal is still messed up but at least now it’s in high definition.
I walked into the doctor’s office and saw he was carrying a little model of the spine, and I was like, ‘fuck’. So it’s not best case. But it’s not the worst, so whatever.
In the next post, join me for a nerve root injection (but I won’t blame you if you don’t).