Back Surgery or NOT...

Everyone has been so nice asking about my back problems. This is not something to post on Facebook but wanted my concerned family and friends to know. If you look at this first picture you can see the square like vertebrae with a white blob in between each square. The blobs are the discs. Each one that has some white color to it is healthy and doing its job which would be the jarring and every day stress we put on our backs. If you look further down my spine you see a completely BLACK disc and if you notice it is protruding out of its supposed to be confined area. This is my current MRI as of last week. This BLACK disc is considered a Severe Degenerative, Bulging Disc. It is NOT doing its job what so ever. I literally have a puffy sack in my mid low back that shows where the disc is bulging out of its area and into my low back skin area. Kinda freaky and the Dr I saw has Never seen the actual puffy sack before.

I can't get this picture to rotate. It is sideways and I'm sorry. My butt is pointing towards the right. You can see a circle towards the left of the picture and then two arms that flow from the circle. At the very top of the picture one of the arms is more elongated, tiny, and curved at the tip. At the bottom of the picture (the other arm of that circle) is broader and the end is not curved but rather odd shaped. This is a bone that grew incorrectly in my back and actually already fused one of my lower discs in space. Which is another reason why I have SO much back pain all the time. Fortunately this 'accidental bone fusion, birth defect' if you will... has actually saved that certain disc from also being black and dead because the bone defect is keeping that disc in place not letting it bulge and die like the black one above it.

In this picture is my butt towards the bottom of the picture and then towards the top is a circle. The circle is my disc but you can see it is not a complete circle and is pushing up or in this picture 'down' against my spinal column and nerve area which is the white area.

I am having severe low back pain that goes into my butt, hip, and leg. My options are steroid injections and then surgery if the injections don't do the trick. I ultimately want to avoid surgery as it will be a 6 week recovery and taking it easy for the following year. Today was my first injection in my low back. It didn't hurt much but unfortunately it can take 72 hours to a week to kick in. Hoping it works faster than that as the injection site is burning and I still have the low back aching pain. But I am surving and still looking forward to our cruise in exactly 2 weeks :)