My Story/Day 1

I have suffered from various back pain conditions since I was 22. I received my first laminectomy at 23 on my l4-l5 for a disc protrusion. The protrusion was pressing on my nerve on both sides, but my surgeon told me he believed that only one side needed to be corrected, and if my other leg was still experiencing sciatica, he would fix the other side. One year later I had a laminectomy on the other side. I lived the next 7 years pain free. I was active and back to doing the things I loved most. At this point I have turned 31, and I was on snowboarding trip for a week with some friends. I don't recall falling or any specific injury occurring but on the morning, we were supposed to fly home, I woke up in excruciating pain with sciatica, numbness, and foot drop. I required a 3rd surgery on the right side of my l5-s1 at 31. After that injury I decided to be more careful in regard to my back. I would still occasionally go snowboarding but not for an entire week and have generally taken it easier in life. I've lost weight and have been more cautious of things that could damage my spine. My wife and I got married 5 years ago, but because of covid and a tragic death of our brother-in-law, we were never able to go on our honey moon. About 6 weeks ago we were finally ready to go on our honeymoon, Italy and Greece. A few days before the trip I started experiencing some tingling in my leg, but I wasn't going to let that stop us from going on a much-needed vacation. Once we started walking around Europe, things progressed, and I was getting a very sharp localized pain in my hip and sacral area. I tried to paint a smile on but naturally I was worried the entire time about another potential serious back injury. I quietly made an appointment with my spine doctor for when we returned home so I could get checked out. Upon arriving home, I was able to schedule an MRI fairly quickly. Naturally I have been an absolute anxious disaster awaiting to hear that I could possibly need another operation. I had the follow up with my doctor and he informs me that there is no change in any of my imaging and I do not require surgery. Hm, ok, that's good news right, but why am I experiencing this horrible pain that is making it difficult to walk? He’s not sure, he thinks it is back related but there isn’t anything on the imaging to support any kind of diagnosis. He has no answer for me and suggests it’s just degenerative disc disease, but to be honest my back doesn’t hurt, and it doesn’t feel nerve related at all.

My mother used to tell me to read about Sarno when I first started dealing with spine issues. I was young and brushed it off as snake oil. My mother had suffered from debilitating back pain after childbirth and she had actually dealt with Sarno personally. My uncle had also visited Sarno in NYC when he had been dealing with crippling sciatica and was eventually cured. I don’t know why I was so incapable of at least giving it a try. Maybe I was young and wanted a quick fix and get on with my life? During this most recent flare up of pain I became very panicked, obsessive, fearful, and depressed about the idea of not having a quick fix to my pain. I have been very down lately as a result, and I reached out to a friend of mine who is a child psychologist to ask him if he could recommend a therapist to help me deal with the mental anguish of dealing with the pain. He quickly started asking me questions about what was going in my life during these episodes of intense pain that lead to surgeries and if I saw any correlation to how my life was going and the increase in pain. I stopped him mid-sentence and asked him if he was trying to talk to me about Sarno? He couldn’t believe I knew who Sarno was and how I was able to recognize where his thought process was going. It turns out that he had been dealing with sciatica for a few years and as a psychologist he decided to give the Sarno method a try and was cured 26 days later. I told him that my mother and uncle had dealt with Sarno personally and I think this is a sign that maybe it’s time to really give this a try. I have read Sarno’s first and second book and I couldn’t relate to the personality traits that is prevalent in people with TMS. As I sit here and ponder back at my life during those very painful moments of my life, I can correlate them to very serious events going in my life. My first back injury was when I graduated college, and I was without work, depressed, and having to move home to my parent’s house until I could figure out my next steps. The second surgery was shortly after a difficult break up. The third surgery was right before I was moving in with my now wife. And this most recent injury was right before a long-awaited honeymoon after many years of dealing with the grief and fall out of the death of a family member. Every single one of my injuries can be linked back to an emotional or traumatic highlight of my life. So, here I am, let’s see how this goes.

 

I bring tidings of Joy and Goodwill.
You are totally AVERAGE!

Reading your story I giggled like a schoolgirl. You are exactly like me ...from the 'When' to the dismissal of Sarno....and in spite of all of that, the surgeries, the drama. yada yada, yada.....I got better in a few weeks after FINALLY picking up a copy of Healing back Pain, reading it continually in a circle and making notes of where I identified with the text ...which was pretty much all of it, particularly everything up to the 12 reminders.

LATER I apologized to the People who told me about Sarno, and they too laughed..because they too had initially rejected it...and even THAT is covered in the text!

Welcome. You're home now. The good news? I am still pain free 25 years later...I am an old man doing stuff I was afraid to do in my late twenties and thirties...and I still have that 11 dollar copy and it is ragged and dog-eared and saved my life.