A New Diagnosis

All right, where was I.  I had an epidural at my blown out L4-L5 disc on 09/01/11.  I had weird numb and tingling feelings on the outside of my leg.  My pain was numb for about 4 hours before conveniently returning.  The doc said it might get worse before it got better.  I was in a good amount of pain for about a week straight.

A week later (09/08/11, if you're keeping track), I went to see Good Doc.  He has hired a D.O. to work in his office, and invited her in to check me out.  I explained what all had happened over the past 7 months, and she said, "Well, perhaps it's Maigne's Syndrome."  I hadn't heard of that before.  Neither had GD.  It's amazingly simple really.  The muscles around the spine where the thoracic vertebra and lumbar vertebra meet (thoracolumbar (TL) junction) get super tight and pull on the crest of the pelvis where all these nerves are.  The ones that feel like SI Joint pain and herniated disc pain.  The treatment is manual therapy and adjustment of the TL junction, which GD did.  When I jumped up, I felt amazazing!  I had gone into the office at a pain level of about 4.  I left with it at about a 1.

The following day, I had a followup for my epidural with Dr. Sean's PA.  I told her what had happened the day before (I still felt pretty good).  She had never heard of this Maigne's Syndrome either, but tried to look it up on some medical diagnosis website.  It wasn't there, so she googled it.  After reading for a moment, she mentioned that it was more of a chiropractic diagnosis.  Um, okay, but that really doesn't matter to me.  Then she did an exam of me and asked where my pain was.  I pointed to a spot on my back/upper butt.  She said, "Oh, that's an inflamed gluteus medius muscle.  It's common after injections."  Derp.  That's what she said before.

I got back to the chiro on Wednesday.  Until them I am rolling on my foam roller and tennis ball and having very little pain.  It's crazy that I've been so tortured for so many months by something that is actually relatively simple to remedy!  I'm glad the new D.O. knows her stuff, or I would still be running in circles!