Quote Originally Posted by Catrin View Post
I got stubborn when I went to the gym tonight and jogged a little before spinning class - and of course my quads got tight because it is too early. Then I had to cut spinning class short because my legs/hips/back whatever was cranky because of my stubbornness I will be ok tomorrow - I just find this troubling me more than I had expected.

Yes Crankin, I hear that hip injection isn't a cake walk, guess it has to be under a live x-ray, and can't imagine what the back injection would be like. My doctor keeps mentioning the one for my hip though - apparently that arthritis is worse than my spine. I am glad to hear that it hasn't slowed you down, and I do not intend to allow it to slow me down either.

So it is good that Knotted mentioned mechanically trained PT here the other day, I already had my appointment and my dr office staff were preparing to fax the order when the x-rays came in. So they are going to go ahead and send him everything...
Crankin - I feel for you. Sounds like your'e dealing with similar stuff I dealt with the past several years.. I think I mentioned the hip injections. My rheumatologist kept pushing them thinking "well, you do have a chronic degenerative disease, this will help for a while at least". I finally got fed up and went to an ortho. He thought it could be hip related, but all imaging indicates nothing that could really be 'fixed'. So, he sent me for a lumbar MRI. It turned out that I had herniated L4/L5 and L5/S1. The latter pushing on the nerve root. I saw a back specialist who said it wasn't bad enough for surgery, but recommended I get an epidural steroid injection (ESI).

I was skeptical (and so was the doc who did the ESI, but he said some women just seem to get pain in the groin from disc herniations). But girl, I didn't realize how much pain I had been in until after the shot kicked in (it was also done under fluoroscopy and sedation). Worth every penny of that copay!

I had that injection in June and did PT in July and September until my wreck in October put me in the hospital...

So, anyway.... The back is weird. Things that seem unrelated, can be the back. I only went for the steroid injections because I've been having such extreme pain for 5 + years. I'd definitely try PT first.