My herniated disc TMS recovery story

Hi folks, I've been writing this essay of my TMS experience in my head for a few weeks now and I just want to get it out there because I am so thankful and overjoyed at having recovered. I hope that others who find themselves in a similar situation or with a similar diagnosis can find this and get some benefit out of my experience.


Background:
I am a 38-year old white collar professional. I have been working a desk job in front of a computer for 20 years. I am also a new father: our first baby arrived in March of 2023. My job involves sitting a computer desk all day, usually slouched in questionable posture. While I have back aches and occasional pains (have seen chiropractor for about a year in 2017), I generally feel ok and manage to balance this with enough exercise to feel fine. I go through on/off phases with habitual daily cannabis smoking, generally in very small amounts.. just "taking the edge off". I'm not a big drinker, I only drink a a beer or two per week. I gave up most exercise when the baby came and focused mostly (and stressed out) on work, to the exclusion of everything else including relaxation and my usual ways of having fun.
I also didn't realize it until I read Dr. Sarno's books, but I also tend to be a perfectionist at work and in most things I do, I have a strong desire to avoid conflict and to please everyone, and I want to be liked (or at least not hated) by everyone. I was brought up in a Christian tradition and I took it to heart and I often put others needs and desires before my own.


May 2023:
I was assigned a difficult project at work that suddenly required me to put in 50-60 hour weeks to keep up, significantly raising my stress levels. Responsibilities at work and responsibilities as a new father pushed out any and all of my recreational and releaxation activities such as tv, movies, video games, reading etc. My day was all about work, cooking, cleaning, waiting on my wife, running errands and then some more work at night. I was tense and when I worked, my body was often contorted in weird ways as I split my time and rotated between different computer monitors.


Late June 2023:
I "hurt my back" doing yard work/masonry (digging, laying down pavers) which I did every morning as my only form of exercise and relaxation. I began taking OTC pain meds Advil and Tylenol every day.
My pain was located in my mid and lower back on the right side, right buttock, right thigh, and right calf. My entire right leg would frequently go into a painful contraction that would not let go for hours. Pain would often wake me up in the middle of the night as the painkiller wore off and I would take another dose around 3-4am every night to get through the rest of the night.
At this time, I believed that I had a slipped disc that was causing sciatica pain.


July 2023:
After a few weeks, my pain kept getting worse. I went to see a chiropractor who diagnosed me with sciatica pain caused by a "sacroiliac strain/sprain with sciatic entanglement". After a few treatments, not seeing any improvement, he gave up (kudos to him for being honest) and recommended that I see a doctor for a course of steroids. I was fearful that I might need surgery to eventually resolve this issue. The prospect of having to manage this pain with opioid medications also scared me, I have seen plenty of junkies on the streets as well as "respectable" Percocet addicts at work and school, and I know that once you go on this stuff, it's very hard to turn away, no matter how "strong" you are.

Around this time, I began to take this matter "a lot more seriously" and gave up all cannabis smoking and started cutting back on what I deemed to be excessive coffee consumption. This was in an attempt to generally improve my health and most of all try to eliminate dehydration as a possible source of my muscle cramping in the leg. None of it really helped though, and actually cutting out the weed made me a lot more stressed out and cutting back caffeine made me extra cranky and tired. I continued with constant Advil and Tylenol doses, totaling about 2000mg of each per day.

I began experiencing emotional breakdowns. Several times a week, I burst into tears randomly and cry in bed for hours. None of it really brought relief. My wife was none too pleased either, that she got stuck taking care of the baby while I was wallowing in pain in bed. I gave up on holding my newborn baby because it seemed to be causing immense back pain whenever I lifted her up. This tore me up inside.


August 2023:
I signed up for physical therapy to see if their approach would be more effective than the chiropractor's. It was not. After several weeks of torturous exercises that seemed to only make things worse, I decided to go see a doctor and see if I could get a muscle relaxant for the muscle cramps in my legs.

Doctor initially diagnosed me with "radiculitis" and prescribed a 3 day course of a steroid "prednisone" and ordered a lumbosacral X-ray. Again, I was dreading that I would need to get surgery. This doctor seemed to be all about fast tracking me through insurance loopholes so I could get an MRI and then explore surgical options. The doctor recommended continuing with PT and had me schedule a follow up appointment for a month later, in late September.
The steroid prednisone kept me up all night for 3 nights straight and did very little to ease my pain. During this course of treatment, I began experiencing symptoms of bi-polar disorder with alternating periods of manic energy and depressive episodes. Very scary stuff for me. I reverted back to using marijuana to help me with the pain and the anxiety and it helped a decent amount.
During this time I was frantically searching the internet and message boards (reddit) for some hint of how other people's experiences with a slipped disc, radiculitis, sciatica turned out, what kind of exercises helped them, what happened with their surgeries, etc. After scouring through hundreds of pages of forums and comment sections on various blogs, I noticed a couple comments to the effect of "Check out John Sarno". They all seemed so vague so at first I ignored them but after the 4th or 5th one, I took a chance on it and looked him up on YouTube. I first watched the 20/20 interview and then an hour-long interview between Dr Schubiner which really spoke to me:

I immediately ordered Dr Sarno's book "Healing back pain" and started reading it a couple days later.


September 2023:
I decided to take a chance on Dr. Sarno's theory that the pain is not caused by a physical defect. At this point it has been 8 weeks, which is the typical amount of time a slipped disc takes to heal. I figured that any physical issue that can heal itself should be healed by now. The pain should be gone. I "proved it" to myself by doing some brief but strenuous work (lifting large planks of wood). I forced myself to carry my baby around for 10 minutes, and my back and leg pain seemed no worse than it was before. I began believing that my pain is caused by some repressed emotion. I just couldn't seem to get at these emotions. I had a hard time believing that it was anger, like Dr. Sarno suggests is likely in 90% of the cases. I was after all, happily employed, a new father, everything going well in life. It made no sense that I would be angry about any of it.

I chose to attack the problem head-on with psychedelics. Having had a decent amount of experience with psychedelics, specifically mushrooms, I figured if it doesn't solve this emotional issue, then at least the worst thing that could happen would be a bad trip and then a couple days of recovery. I figured 3.5 dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms should be enough to "crack the coconut" and help these emotions leak out so that I may confront them. I googled prednisone + psychedelics to see if there may be any interactions and coincidentally found a study that showed that taking psychedelics a week after this steroid reduced the amount of anxiety experienced during a psychedelic trip. Great! So I made a plan to take the shrooms a week after my last prednisone dose.


The mushroom trip:

I took the mushroom dose around 3am and began experiencing the full effects around 5am. To my surprise, this trip was almost completely non-visual, non-hallucinatory. Purely in my mind and very unlike previous experiences. I was enjoying some Pink Floyd and other favorites, played a little guitar to occupy myself. I did some stretches, and continued to just do whatever, waiting for something to happen.

Finally the coconut cracked! The mushrooms began steering me towards thoughts and memories of my childhood. Specifically, childhood trauma related to my father. My father was an alcoholic. My childhood was dominated by his verbal abuse (95% directed at my mother), and the most poignant memories are of the sound of his voice - deep, angry, guttural yelling, an expression of drunken rage. To my shock, *I* began speaking in that same angry voice. I had never spoken with such a voice. It made me think of that movie "The Exorcist" where a young child started speaking in that deep demon voice. I suppose it was an apt comparison. My own inner demon was unleashed.

My repressed anger, rage, finally made a "public debut". I continued speaking in that voice, phrases such as "it's so hard, it's so difficult, it's so heavy" and each time I said, I quickly shifted from anger to laughter. The alternating vocalization of rage and lunatic laughter (truly a scary experience!) went on for a good 15 minutes until it stopped being "funny". I feared that I had lost my mind. It's quite scary to hear yourself laugh like a lunatic you might hear in an insane asylum in movies. The release of that energy felt cathartic, though and after a while I felt I had levelled out a bit. I began sobbing and repeating the words "pain and shame" accompanied by indistinct thoughts and memories of my childhood. I "jumped around in time" and felt like I was 8 years old and recounted some memories from that time period, then I was 14 and memories from that time flooded in, then I was 2 year old and it was more about just pure emotions. The associated feelings of pain were more or less the same, and yet each seemed to be flavored by how a child might process painful emotions differently at age 2, 8, 14, etc. I had never experienced emotional pain like this, but let me tell you, it is every bit as painful as physical pain. I got down on all fours and sobbed uncontrollably for an hour or more. I finally got up and there was a big puddle of my own snot and tears. The emotional pain continued to gush out, like a newly opened oil well. Ugly, dark, dirty "oil" kept pouring out like a fountain.


Post-mushroom trip:
It took me a couple days to recover, and I continued to have random emotional outbursts and episodes of sudden crying that hit me at most inopportune times. I usually had no choice but to just go lay down in bed and cry it out. Repressing it would just delay it. Eventually it all subsided and I was back to normal. My fear of permanently becoming a lunatic did not come to fruition. I regained my full mental faculties after about a week.
After "releasing my rage", my TMS pain symptoms were reduced to about 80% of their original intensity.

Following Dr. Sarno's guidelines, I "repudiated the physical diagnosis" and cancelled my follow-up appointment with the doctor as well as my physical therapy appointments. I continued to read Dr. Sarno's other books (Mindbody prescription) and repeated them as necessary.
The X-ray results of my lumbar spine came back. I ignored them for a while, but I couldn't get "past it" knowing that there may possibly still be some physical root cause for my pain. I finally opened up the email and saw that the technician found one abnormality: "a prominent discogenic narrowing at L5-S1". I started frantically googling it but the wording of the condition seem to be unusual and I wasn't able to find anything relevant. I decided to ignore it and let it me & soon I remembered that I had been treated about 5 years ago by a chiropractor who also requested X-Rays and found something in this same area of the spine. He successfully treated me to eliminate back and abdominal pains back then, so I figured, this is a non-issue since I have probably been living with this 5+ years without any real consequence. It took me several weeks to accept that this "discogenic narrowing" is not the cause of my pain.
I continued having poor sleep and kept taking smaller doses of OTC painkillers, but overall it was better now. I did not need to have a bunch of special pillowed lined up to prop me up "just right" anymore, etc. By chance, I came down with a cold and started taking Nyquil each night to help with the symptoms. Nyquil is famous for being a great sleep-aid.

After about a week of getting a solid 6-7 hours of sleep every night, my TMS pain was reduced to about 50% of its original intensity. I was able to do, well, half, of everything I normally could. I could hold and carry my baby around for a few minutes at a time. I could sit at my desk and work normally for a little bit. I began to dip my toes into doing cardio exercise. I devoted time every night specifically to relaxing and enjoying myself with family time, a movie, and videogames - things I that I took a break from for over 2 months as I frantically focused on trying to "cure" my pain. I consider letting go and relaxing to be one of the most significant factors that enabled relief in my symptoms.


October 2023:
Throughout September and October, my TMS symptoms continued to improve. I remember reading in one of Dr Sarno's books or some forum comments that it can take 5-6 weeks for the pain pathways/nerves to calm down and for TMS pain to fully subside. Sure enough, as I write this today near the end of October, it has been about 6 weeks since that mushroom trip which was the turning point for me in all this.
At my job, I completed the work project that was causing me so much stress. It took about 3 months to complete. Now that it is complete, I am far more relaxed and my recovery was turbo-charged as soon as this source of stress was removed.


It is now almost November 2023...:
My pain symptom intensity is about 5% of what it used to be and it is no longer interfering with my life in any major way. The remaining pain is localized primarily in my right calf. I also have numbness in the right foot which seems to slowly be getting better on its own. There is also annoying but relatively small pain in my lower back lumbar area that comes and goes. It seems to correlate with poor posture (e.g. rotating my trunk to stare at a side monitor) while sitting in my office chair. I can fix the lumbar area pain by doing a specific stretch as needed (laying down with an exercise ball under my feet and rotating the 90 degree bent legs back and forth until the lower back "clicks"). I try to stretch the calf muscle every day a little bit and it is slowly getting better too.


Final thoughts:
Even though this is already a pretty long essay, I actually left out a LOT of details and potential factors that I thought played a role in my recovery. However, most of those details are either basically same as you will find in Dr Sarno's books and in the letters from his patients, and all of their experiences. Many if not most of those accounts seem to have a punchline of "childhood trauma" and that is exactly what seemed to be at the root of my TMS pain. What tipped me over the edge into full TMS was the added pressures and responsibilities of fatherhood coupled with an unusual amount of pressure and stress from my job.

I consider myself extremely fortunate to have stumbled onto Dr. Sarno's work relatively early in my pain journey. All in all, front start to finish, this whole thing took up "only" 3 months of my life. Sure, my summer was ruined (cue a clip of Seinfeld "Summer of George" here ha-ha), but at least I am pretty much back to normal now.

I still sometimes think about what would happen if I didn't repudiate the physical diagnosis? If I had followed the treatment courses recommended by the chiropractor, doctor, and physical therapists, would I actually get better? I would certainly still be stressing out a whole lot about my x-rays and MRIs; I'd be talking to different doctors and exploring unnecessary surgeries or pain management drug treatments. The physical therapist said right before I told him I quit PT, that the next steps for me were to put me on some medieval spinal traction machine.

Of course, I also have occasional doubts, like "Was it REALLY tms or was it just a herniated disc that just took an extra long time to heal itself?" I don't know the answer to that, but I guess if there is one positive takeaway from my journey, it was that I did release my inner rage and confronted my demons. I now feel emotionally much healthier for it, as if a weight has been lifted from me. My wife sometimes still comments that she can't believe the recovery I made as she watched me scraping the proverbial bottom before finally bouncing off towards recovery. I wouldn't wish TMS upon anyone... for anyone going through this, I hope my account gives you some hope and helps you achieve victory over this pernicious mental trickery that our brains can play on us. I hope my experience helps others find their way and I am happy to answer any questions!

 

Good for you!! It was lucky/serendipitous that you found out about tms/Sarno so quickly. Some of us floundered for years! But it was obviously meant to be. Especially - i think - as you yourself had become a Dad. In your psyche that would of been triggering because of the experiences you had as a child. I see it that you went thru this process so your subconscious could ensure that you processed the childhood trauma - in time for you to become a good/present Dad - of course being a tms 'type' - you want to do it really well or perfectly!!! So be sure to give yourself a break on that one - be a good Dad - but not too good!1 Thet goes for your wife too - she might not have symptoms now/yet - but I bet she would benefit from these insights - applied to her repressed stress etc - we all have some somewhere!!!
Good luck to you all!

 

ps - meant to say - the mushroom trip was a brave route to go - they are being widely used now for depression, anxiety etc - but having done them in my youth - I am happy not to do them now. But good on you for going down a 'natural' route - that comes without dosage or guarantees!

 

I had to create an account just to reply to this post. This is the most similar story to my journey so far (although I've been dealing with my TMS symptoms a bit longer - since June 2022) and I can relate to almost everything you said. After initially refusing Dr. Sarno's theories/methods I did a deep dive into them about 6 months ago and have been able to greatly reduce my pain.

I can relate to your childhood trauma along with the stress of every day life finally hitting a tipping point. Like you, the use of psychedelic mushrooms as a recovery aid really helped me along the way to help defragment my brain to get to the root cause.

Thank you so much for sharing you experience as it gives me hope that I'll finally rid myself of my remaining symptoms.