Hello dear Barbell Medicine Doctors,
I am a mid-30s male, 177cm, now 85kg (92kg pre-injury) and I am a german police officer in an emergency/riot control unit. I have been powerlifting for the last ten years and managed a total just under 600kgs.
End of march this year i hurt my back while doing a 5x5@200kg deadlift set and on the last rep i lost tightness in the core an felt a sharp shot into the back of my lower spine which was later MRI’d and showed a disc bulge at l4/5 and something like a “very minor herniation” at l5s1… and because I am an absolute idiot I didnt let anything rest, was so annoyed by it that i kept bending forward into the massive backpain to “punish” myself somehow to the end that at the begin of june i managed to finally rupture the disc, felt a massive pain shooting down my right leg that left me laying on the floor.
So in the second MRI from the first week of june showed a, in the words of the orthopedic, “oh boy, thats a big one” central medial herniation that had partially sequestered off of the l4/5 disc, it basically looked as if someone puked into my spinal canal somehow. Three different doctors, two orthopedics and a neuro-surgeon suggested surgery and to stop heavy lifting but after having scheduled that three times and something came in between every time I took it as a sign to not do it and declined. All the time since I injured myself i tried to keep up weight training and lifting, but I didnt deadlift or squat anything heavier than 40kg until mid-june. My biggest fear is that I fucked it up even worse by always trying to do my training, especially heavy overhead 5x5’s allthough i never had pain during training.
So my massive backpain was subsiding after about the time the rupture occured but now I started to experience strong pains in my legs, sometimes both legs, sometimes only one side without one beeing the pain-dominant one - the pain was limited downwards to about the knee and i didnt have any neurological problems in terms of numbness, drop-foot etc, only strong pain. In total I had three cortisone shots into my spine + a week of oral cortisone but as expected it didnt really do anything. After about eight weeks the pain into my thighs, mostly front and side of the thigh, started to diminish but instead the pain “settled” and stays on my upper+outer glutes on both sides and it wanders to my hip/femur head with rarely pain in the leg and if so only left now, in addition I feel something like a light pain from my lower left back heading towards and “under(?)” my pelvis towards the upper left buttocks. This time the left one is the pain dominant side meaning it is either only left or both, very rarely only right buttocks. So for the last ~2 months it basically stayed the same, maybe the pain went down a bit but nothing really dramatic next to maybe sometimes a tingle in my left thigh or calf, on most days it is bad in the morning and worst in the evening and if i exercised my glutes and have musclesoreness in the painful area it feels as if my buttocks is on fire and the muscle “leading to the femur head” is swollen, painful and sensitive (I tried to massage the area with a ball but it feels as if I want to jump right up again). The thing is, that it has been like this most of the last months after the rupture starting in june, that when i exercise i dont have a lot of pain, I’m even sometimes painfree. In september I started lifting regurlarly again as I thought it wouldnt matter anyway, I am doing deadlifts, high-bar Sqs, benching, overhead pressing and isolation movements at the moment at around 40-50% of my former training weights, so far i have progressed to 110kg DL, 90kg Sq and bench with minimum legdrive around 100kg for 10r and a 50kg overhead for 10r. It seems to not increase my pain (unless muscle-soreness comes in) in the buttocks and just a moderate amount of pain/uncomfortable feeling + a perceived instability in my lower back. The only real “trigger” I could find is that sitting and driving is not a pleasant thing but i force myself to do it anyway to read my emails and maybe game a bit at my Computer. Additionally the pain seems to build up after some hours of being awake so mostly the pain is a lot more in the evening than during the day.
I have been on sick-leave since april and I’m basically going for three walks a day (on which the pain mostly sets in after some time of walking my route), going to the PT(stretching, mobilisation and core strengthening), training/lifting within the capacity i trust myself to do every day and do loads of core-exercises. Compared to other posts in your forums it feels as if I am complaining about a problem that others here would rather have than their massive sciatic pain day and night. I have near to no pain when I am laying down.
German healthcare system itself is good but we have nearly nothing next to normal PT (which I have been doing for three months now) when it comes to injured lifters that fucking well want to keep lifting and stay strong.
As my pain in the ass and hips and a bit in the lower back has basically not changed for ~2 months and I have to start working again in October (mostly desk duty until february next year but if big demonstrations/riots etc come up I have to stand up to 16hrs on the street/running/chasing/sprinting in 25kg of gear, we also get deployed over quite some distances so it involves long hours of sitting in a bus which is a horror to me) I dont really know how to handle this situation, obviosly my employer cant just let me stay at home another six months but due to the pain I feel unstable and not really capable of subdueing anyone above 50kg of bodyweight and pretty weak even though tests by the PT say I’m stable and i can appearantly lift weights to a certain degree. I read Dr. Barakis articles on pain and pain-perception but after half a year I’m quite worn out from it or I lost my ability to accept/embrace the pain/the process until it might go away in XXX time. My head is just fucked up.
My question is if I should carry on with my lifting, training (free weights, machines, core exercises and some sort of cardio that doesnt hurt on that day) and walking as part of healing even though my pain is just not going down any further for now, I’m afraid I hindred my healing with trying to keep training/lifting weights nearly every week multiple days since the initial injury and it is unpredictable when it “hits” me or if its just a normal pain-day. I dont want to take another MRI and if the police orthopedic orders it because I tell them that I’m still in big pain and it still looks so banged up I might get discharged/relocated to desk-duty permanently. I am super frustrated with the absence of lifting/strength-sport related doctors and PTs that can tell me how to behave/what to do/not to do here in germany so the only real guidance I found was on the internet from anglo-countries, your forum/articles etc. I fear my text here isnt really structured but i still hope that you guys can understand my point or my my lack of orientation, my helplessness and how to deal with this injury and my fear about it… I am just so afraid of re-injuring myself on duty/in training or to make matters worse again if i push to hard and try to live with the pain for now. On the internet you read articles of people with my kind of injury and how they’re back squatting and deadlifting heavy after 12 weeks and how their coach prescribed them exactly how and what to do for every week and yeah, it feels as if I did everything wrong and it feels hopeless at times.
P.S. my MRI from start june looked a bit like this one https://breakingmuscle.com/view-image?src=images/bydate/20130927/al4pic1.jpg - only bigger and it had shot out upwards + disc was bulding all the way to the back of the canal.
