Prolapsed disc

After last week’s self-pity-fest, I thought it might be a good idea to give myself a genuine problem to get my teeth into. So I slipped the disc in my back again.

Actually, that’s not quite accurate, but it’s a quick way of summing it up for people that conveys the seriousness of the situation. Here’s how it works.

Discs are like round baby sponges that sit between the vertebrae of your spine, and allow it to bend. Ideally, they are full of fluid. When they start to wear out, they dry out, or become desiccated. (It’s such a joy sometimes to discover a new use for a word that you thought only applied to coconut.) Just like those ramer baby sponges that go weirdly rock hard when they dry. NB ramer, not ramen like the noodles, as I previously thought. Let’s have a food theme today.

They can also start to bulge, a bit like when you ice the bottom layer of a carrot cake right to the edges, then put the top on and realise your mistake as it all squidges out the sides. Now this isn’t necessarily a problem, or a cause of pain in itself. Discs don’t hurt. But when they press on nerves they do. And then they get really malicious and start a chinese whisper with the surrounding muscles, which get all uptight and throw complete spasms.

A prolapse is when is a significant bit of the disc pops out of its usual jelly mould. So if you were to look down at a cross section, that disc would look like a round thing with a marble attached the side. Or a child’s drawing of a snowman.

This is also known as a slipped disc, and it’s what first happened about a year ago, when I got up from half an hour sitting on the floor at a 1-year-old’s birthday party, and fainted with pain. Apparently I managed to lay Logie elegantly on the floor next to me before I passed out.

Sometimes they go back in, but mine didn’t, as we discovered in May this year. The pain came back, the MRI showed that it was still out, if not slightly more so. Lifting Logie into the car (actually, on that occasion I couldn’t, and had to wait for a stranger to come near enough in the car park to rescue us) set it off again.

After both those incidents, I got some seriously brilliant painkillers (the sort that drug dealers charge extra for on The Wire) until I could have a steroid injection into both the nerve and the facet joint around the culpable disc (L4/L5, since you ask). Steroids can’t make the disc go back again, but they reduce the screaming inflammation in everything around it. And it worked like a dream.

On Thursday morning, I was giving Logie his breakfast and turned to face him slightly on my chair. Something felt wrong. I tried to stand up, and get him out of his highchair, and I couldn’t. Not ‘I couldn’t because it hurt too much that I knew I should stop’ but I physically couldn’t do that movement. So I rang our totally amazing lifesaving nextdoor neighbours, who let themselves in with their key and rescued us. Got Logie dressed, took him off for the morning, gave him lunch and put him to bed. Got me to the sofa, brought me some clothes while I waited for the emergency GP.

So nothing dramatic triggered it. The situation is so knife-edge, the distance between the prolapsed (or herniated – that’s what you call it when it’s permanently prolapsed) disc and the nerves such fractions of millimetres, that anything can set it off.

The pain is blinding, the smallest of movements seemingly impossible. Because of being pregnant, I can’t have anything stronger than paracetamol and codeine (a bit like trying to feed 34 toddlers with two fish fingers and eight peas). I can’t have a steroid injection, because it needs to be guided with a scanning machine to get it in the right place, and you can’t expose the baby to the harmful stuff that imaging machines use.

What I need is a microdiscectomy – an operation to remove the pesky bit of sticking-out disc. Obviously that’s not on the cards until after I’ve had the baby. We did talk about having it before I got pregnant, but I was wary, because the surgeon said he’d need to go in through my stomach rather than my back given that the prolapse is unusually central – ie, pushing directly backwards, rather than out to one side.

If only I could have a c-section and a a microdiscectomy at the same time, but although I keep making that as a ho ho passing joke, no one seems to think it a good idea. Clearly it’s not, but having one op, recovering from it, then wash rinse repeating a few weeks later, hence not being able to lift or care properly for my newborn baby and toddler for months, is a total ball-ache.

But let’s look on the bright side. It is getting better. Five days later I can walk fairly normally now, though from room to room only. The pain is more like 5 or 6 out of 10 than 8 or 9. The diazepam they are giving me to try and make my wretched buttock muscles relax means I’m actually getting some sleep at night. I haven’t any loss of sensation in either leg (unlike last time) or problems with my waterworks (unlike last time).

But I am miserable. It distracted me from boo-hooing about the boy baby discovery, but now that’s back with a vengeance and I can’t stop the water coming out of my eyes. I am worn down with pain. Frustrated that I can’t do anything, especially grab Logie and squeeze him a bit too hard, woodpecker kiss his podgy cheek and eat his neck, or pick him up when he put his arms up to me and implores ‘Mumma?’.

And that’s what I need to do right now, more than ever, to stop all these ungrateful feelings. To grasp solid evidence of the utter brilliance of a small human just like him. To feel the solid-gold weight of how lucky I already am. He didn’t want to come to me this morning, and just clung to Jon. I guess it’s confusing for him, my not doing the things I usually do. But he did give me a good lying-down cuddle before his lunchtime sleep. And gave the baby a lovely kiss. He is the best medicine.