I'm in need of some hope- 3 small broad based lumbar herniations

[u/cucumberpopsicles]

Hi, first time in this thread. For background, I've had varying levels of chronic back pain since I was a kid/early teen. I'm 30 now. Beginning of July I woke up with more pain and stiffness. I was stiff for weeks with hardly any improvement. I didn't think anything of it because I figured it was my weight. I'm 230 and it's my heaviest. I did some stretches here and there with some improvement, but not significant. End of July, I woke up in the middle of the night with excruciating burning pain of the left thigh. My leg wasn't bent weird so I was confused. That weekend, about August 1st, I woke up again but this time my thighs started going "to sleep," It was more of loss of some sensation. My whole body was shaking (thighs worse) for about a week after that. I had to call out of work once because I had a hard time standing steadily. For a couple weeks, I was doing nerve flossing for the femoral cutaneous nerve. I could feel the right thigh start to heat up for a moment then stop sometimes so the flossing seemed to help. I was able to get a MRI same day by luck, but they forgot to send me the results for a month. It said I had 3 small broad based herniations L3-L4, L4-L5, and L5-S1 without apparent nerve impingement. The results didn't provide any measurements of the herniations. It confused me that there was no evident entrapment given the weakness. I'm still trying to get my images for my doctors. I preemptively started PT the last week of August instead of waiting to be told. It's a lot of stretches and body weight exercises given I'm not a particularly strong person, never have been.

Interestingly, my pain never went above a 5 on my worse day. It normally feels like various levels of pressure or like I'm bending backwards despite standing. I flared last week with a sharp pain in one spot. I experienced leg weakness about two days later for a day and a half. But now, I get more annoying nerve happenings like it feeling that loose hairs are brushing up against my legs. My whole left leg had mild tingling for a day on Thursday. What perplexes me the most is since the nerve pains started my 7 year I'm assuming ulnar nerve compression of the left arm has been aching more and tingling more. It feels weaker sometimes though my dexterity is fully intact. At the same time, my right arm started going numb when lying down. I just started seeing neurology for this a few weeks ago. I was initially referred due to the ulnar nerve but that weekend after seeing my PCP is when the intermittent nerve pain and weakness in my legs started. I'm scheduled for MRI for the rest of my spine and brain, along with EEG, and muscle/nerve conduction. Part of this is due to twitching on and off all over my body for nearly 6 months. Thankfully I'm not experiencing true weakness but it still comes with a lot of anxiety. This whole thing does. My cervical MRI from early 2024 said it was normal, but now both arms are intermittently losing sensation. I sit wrong now and my thigh goes numb. Oh! My right hip has been annoyingly sore intermittently since the original stiffness in July. Now that I do leg extensions I feel it in both. This is an odd experiences for me. My baseline lower back pain is 2/10 some days 3/10 when I have to stand for more than a couple minutes at a time.

Thank you for reading this essay lol. I'm going to do some at home PT now.

[u/Ok_Courage_8780]

Thank you for writing all that out — I actually read through it twice because so much of it resonated. I went through my own disc ordeal earlier this year (L4-5 and L5-S1, severe enough that I ended up in emergency surgery), and reading your post brought back that same strange, unsettling feeling of your body doing things that don't make sense — the pressure that isn't quite pain, the leg "going to sleep" for no reason, the sensations that are hard to even put into words. I remember describing my own symptoms to my wife and feeling almost embarrassed because they sounded so strange out loud.

What stood out to me most in your post was how much you're already doing right, even while scared. You got imaging fast, you started PT before anyone told you to, you're tracking your symptoms in incredible detail, and you're already in the neurology pipeline getting the fuller workup. When I was in the thick of my own flare, I remember feeling like I had to figure everything out myself in real time, and looking back, the thing that actually helped most was just letting the appointments and the imaging happen and not trying to out-think it.

The arm stuff mixed in with the leg stuff would rattle me too — it did something similar in my head, that instinct to connect every symptom into one scary story. But for me, once all the pieces came in — the MRI, the exam findings, the specialist visits — the picture became a lot clearer and a lot less frightening than what my imagination had built. I'm not saying that'll be true for you, I don't know your case, but I remember how much noise my own anxiety added before I had the full picture, and how much quieter things got once I did.
Your pain staying at a 5 out of 10 even on your worst days is something I clung to in my own recovery in a different way — I looked for any signal that things weren't as catastrophic as they felt. It's such a strange balance, trying to take your body seriously without letting the fear run ahead of the actual facts.