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I had just recently passed my motorcycle test and taken possession of a lovely, shiny new bike. After a short time getting used to it, I started commuting on a regular basis. One morning I was riding past a line of traffic, when I saw the bonnet of a car begin to edge out from between the stationary vehicles, so I sounded my horn. The car kept on pulling out, so I sounded my horn again and began to brake. He still pulled out. I tried to swerve, but was hit on the front wheel, sending me flying over the bonnet of the car. At the time I was more concerned about the state of my lovely new bike than myself. Little did I know that this was to be the start of a year of suffering. A month or so later I began to get backache. This started as a slight niggle when bending over, but quickly worsened. Soon I was having problems getting up from chairs. My back would lock in the seated position, searing heat as if from a hot poker would shoot up either side of my spine and I would have to stay bent doubled until the pain subsided and I could stand upright again. I went to see an osteopath. After hearing about the accident, he checked out my spine. It was a mess. Apparently the impact had put a number of the vertebrae out of place and some of the muscles had gone in to spasm due to the shock. I began a course of therapy to ease the muscle spasm and manipulation to realign the spine. After a few weeks, everything seemed to be working normally. There was a bit of a dull ache from time to time, but this was put down to the pummelling my back had been receiving. For a time, life went back to normal. Little did I know this was to change dramatically. Sitting at work one morning, I went to get up. The next thing I knew I was screaming in agony. Something had gone wrong with the base of my spine, sending white-hot shards of pain up my back and down my legs. I could not sit, I could not stand, anything and everything just caused more pain. I returned to the osteopath. He decided that there was damage to one of the discs at the base of the spine and that it may have moved out of position. There was no way he could attempt manipulation, so I started on a course of acupuncture to try to relax the muscles. In the meantime I was signed off from work. A month went by. There was no improvement. By now I spent most of my life lying on the floor. I could not sleep at night from the pain. During the day all I could do was take short walks once or twice a day to exercise before collapsing exhausted. Things came to a head when I tried sitting for a short spell. I went to stand up and the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor. I had blacked out from the agony. What if I had fallen against something? This scared me rigid. I was referred to a physiotherapist. She found that there were even more problems. To try to take pressure from my back, the main stomach muscle had taken over most of the work. As a result I had muscle wastage around the pelvis and my hips were tilted and twisted out of place. She arranged a series of exercises to strengthen the wasted muscles, which worked well enough for me to go back to work, ending an absence of nine weeks. I continued to attend physiotherapy, where they started me on a course of traction. This relieved the pain temporarily, but it would soon return. It was decided that there was something seriously wrong with one of the discs in the spine, so an appointment was made with an orthopaedic surgeon and a scan arranged. The scan results were ugly. First I was shown one of my healthy discs. It was a firm white object sitting neatly in between the bones of the spine. Then I saw the damaged disc. It was black with grey spots and was bulging out from one side, giving little or no support to my back whatsoever. There were two options. An operation, or see if it would improve by itself. This could take years, so I decided that it had to be an operation. There was a ten percent risk of paralysis that went with this, but years of the agony and suffering would have driven me insane. I knew nothing about the operation at all. All I remember was being given an injection, being told to count to ten and the next thing it was two hours later and I was lying in recovery. The operation had been a total success. Later on my physiotherapist and the surgeon visited me to tell me what had been done. The disc had been removed, another disc was found to be bulging out of place but they were able to force this back into place. Also, my sciatic nerve had become trapped against my hip, so they had performed a root canal to make space for the nerve. This explained why there was so much suffering. The nerve was swollen and any movement squeezed it still further, wracking my body with pain. After another month of physiotherapy, during which time I had to learn how to walk properly again and strengthen my body to cope with the loss of a disc, I was discharged for the last time. It had been just short of a year after the accident, I had missed close to four months off of work and my life had been completely disrupted. I will never make a complete recovery. I will have a weakened back for the rest of my life and can never play any sports again, but this is a small price to pay to end the relentless agony I had endured. As for the bike? It was repaired and actually seems to be the best therapy for my back! Any time I am feeling stiff, I go for a ride and the stiffness is completely gone by the time I return. No-one has been able to explain this to me, but as my physiotherapist said "If it works, don’t’ question it, just do it!" Back to Bob's index... |