Chronic Pain: It All Started With Sciatica But What Exactly IS Sciatica?
How sciatica occurs, what the likely causes are and my personal experience of it.
My pain started as sciatica, completely out of the blue with no warning for no apparent reason whilst I was working in an office in 1991. I felt pain in one leg, all the way from the top of my thigh down to my ankle. It was intermittent in nature to start with but within a short space of time, I developed sciatica in my other leg too. It would regularly swap sides, right then left, left then right. And then one day, I suddenly had pain in both legs AT THE SAME TIME! It also became ‘permanent’ which was my way of describing it as being constant. I had sciatica pain all of the time, 24/7, day and night.
Sciatica is actually a symptom. It primarily affects the legs where the sciatic nerve is found.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, the following link to Tina’s article explains sciatica in much greater detail — I highly recommend doing this if you have little or no knowledge of sciatica (it’s quite long and potentially overwhelming, but stick with it):
https://livingwellpain.net/understand-sciatica
My sciatica was hideous. It ruled my life. Very few moments passed when I wasn’t aware of it or didn’t think about it. It wasn’t as a result of an injury in the same way Tina’s sciatica was. She had an operation to try and relieve her pain. I didn’t. She still experiences sciatic pain. I don’t. Our experiences of sciatica are similar but the outcomes are very different.
Whilst researching my sciatica, I found a resource that resonated with me called painscience.com. The owner of the site, Paul Ingraham, is a science writer who also suffered with chronic pain. I found his articles extremely helpful in understanding and educating myself about my pain. Paul has also written a comprehensive article about sciatica and his findings here:
https://www.painscience.com/articles/sciatica.php
I trust Paul because my experience of sciatica is covered here and I agree with his opinions on the complexities of the likely causes of it. I value his knowledge as a practitioner, researcher, and someone who experienced his own pain.
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What Caused My Sciatica?
I don’t actually know the answer to that. My sciatica appeared when I was working in an office and sat on a stool with a metal footrest. I was sitting with my legs crossed (something I very rarely do now) and as I uncrossed my legs and placed my foot on the floor, I felt what I can only describe as a sharp electric shock down the length of my right leg. I actually thought I’d been shot! I was stuck in my tracks and quickly looked around to see who was pointing the gun at me but there wasn’t anyone. In fact, everyone was oblivious to me. I tentatively took another step. Nothing. And another… and then, ouch!… it happened again, the electric shock. I realised it was coming from my leg and not something that someone else was doing to me.
What I think
Perhaps I had a herniated (bulging) disc? Perhaps it was, as Paul puts it, ‘the elusive ‘piriformis syndrome’? Perhaps it was trigger points? Or hamstring syndrome, clunleal nerve entrapment, great throchanteric pain syndrome… it could have been any one of those things or a combination (see Pain Science link above for definitions). Who knows? All I know is that it hurt — a lot! But what it started out as is not what it developed into. The kind of pain I experienced changed, the pain spread to different areas. It went from feeling sharp and electric to dull and achy, but intense all the same.
Sciatica was the introduction to my pain becoming chronic (see article Chronic Pain: Chronic Pain — What Is It?). What I believe happened from this point on was that I developed TMS — Tension Myositis Syndrome — a phrase coined by John Sarno. Or is that MPS — Myofasical Pain Syndrome? Paul Ingraham wrote an interesting article with his take on John Sarno and TMS/MPS here:
https://www.painscience.com/articles/sarno-review.php
I recently discovered TMS from Dan Buglio who has suffered with his own chronic pain and fully recovered from it. He is now a pain coach. He learnt about his pain from John Sarno and explores the complexities of TMS and how to overcome them, from his point of view, on his Facebook group where he posts daily short videos:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/PainFreeYou
Back to my sciatica. TMS took over my body but the driving force was in my brain — more about that in another article. Looking back at my pain, I have been able to break down little by little what happened and join the dots. The body is very clever, too clever in some instances, with this being a prime example. When I got sciatica, my body went into overcompensation. In other words, my body was trying to protect me from the pain, and without me knowing (you see, I told you the body is clever!). By doing this it caused unnatural movements. What I mean is that my body developed movements which were not natural — not the way it was designed and intended to move, the way I naturally moved from birth. I believed, at the start, that a mix of overcompensation along with unnatural movements resulted in the extreme nature of pain I felt. My muscles were in a state of permanent tension all the time and which I believe resulted in the development of ‘false’ sciatica (‘piriformis syndrome’ being the likely culprit). This is where there is no evidence of injury/damage to the sciatic nerve, and inflammation can irritate the nerve depending on how close it is to the inflammation. This can occur by way of trigger points which are found in muscles. We all have trigger points and they occur in exactly the same places in the body. I will expand on trigger points in another article. When the pain was chronic, the physical components were perhaps not as important anymore because the brain had taken over running the show. I will write more about posture and movements in a future article.
Why Did My Sciatica Get Better?
I believe my sciatica symptoms disappeared completely because there was no injury or damage to the sciatic nerve root (although I’m not entirely of the opinion that injury or damage to the sciatic nerve root means that sciatica pain will remain either). When I began on my quest to get better, I undertook a combination of exercise and stretching and it was this, in the main, that had an impact on the reduction of my pain. In all honesty, I don’t actually clearly recall when and how this happened in detail as it was such a long time ago now. All I can report is that my sciatica symptoms did fully disappear and that it took quite a few years to do so. I had sciatic pain 24/7 for at least 10 years and it was around 2001/2002 when I began to get better. I will be writing about my experiences with exercise in future. My chronic pain manifested itself into flare ups and for a long time I still experienced pain in my buttocks, hips and thighs (above the knee only and no numbness — in fact I never suffered with numbness at all).
For many years I was chasing a physical causation for my pain because it had to be the only answer, right?
