Spent up body

[coderasm]

I have an accumulation of old injuries. The whole right side of my body of f'd. It primarily stems from a motorcycle accident I had when I was around 14. I have had 2 mri's over the last 15 years. Each time I was told I have degenerative disc disease and would need a fusion. I have tried lifting on and off over those years and would eventually stop from pain or from thinking i was going to make things worse. At this point I have partially lost muscular sensation in my lower right core, right glute and the outer part of my right quad and hamstring. Due to the loss of sensation/atrophying of muscles, my right knee is experiencing inner pain. I know I have some severe nerve impingement/deadening. During my last visit with an orthopedic spine specialist a few years ago he told me surgery may or may not do anything especially if nerves are already deadened. I have been doing the first phase of starting strength for a month now. The muscles with loss of sensation on the right side of my body are noticeably smaller than the unaffected muscles on the other side. When lifting all my pain is tolerable. However after the lifting session, my cns goes crazy and my body feels totally trashed. Am I kidding myself by continuing with the program? With the severity of my loss of muscular sensation should I finally bite the bullet and go through with a surgery. The degenerative disc(s) are in my lumbar. I am 35. Thank you for any input.

[Will Morris]

I have an accumulation of old injuries. The whole right side of my body of f'd. It primarily stems from a motorcycle accident I had when I was around 14. I have had 2 mri's over the last 15 years. Each time I was told I have degenerative disc disease and would need a fusion. I have tried lifting on and off over those years and would eventually stop from pain or from thinking i was going to make things worse. At this point I have partially lost muscular sensation in my lower right core, right glute and the outer part of my right quad and hamstring. Due to the loss of sensation/atrophying of muscles, my right knee is experiencing inner pain. I know I have some severe nerve impingement/deadening. During my last visit with an orthopedic spine specialist a few years ago he told me surgery may or may not do anything especially if nerves are already deadened. I have been doing the first phase of starting strength for a month now. The muscles with loss of sensation on the right side of my body are noticeably smaller than the unaffected muscles on the other side. When lifting all my pain is tolerable. However after the lifting session, my cns goes crazy and my body feels totally trashed. Am I kidding myself by continuing with the program? With the severity of my loss of muscular sensation should I finally bite the bullet and go through with a surgery. The degenerative disc(s) are in my lumbar. I am 35. Thank you for any input.

There is an awful lot to unpack here. First and foremost, it is readily apparent that you are likely within the subset of the population with very poor self-efficacy and you have a lot of fear-avoidant behaviors and catastrophizing with regards to your pain experience. Even the title of your post is a strong demonstration of this. Without knowing anything else, a clinician would rightfully give you a very guarded prognosis for improvement until you are able to effectively manage these maladaptive personality traits. You made a pretty profound statement (albeit pieced together from two separate parts) that you feel better with training but stopped because you thought you were going to make things worse. Until this thinking trap gets removed, you are likely to continue to spiral down into the abyss.

The next thing is there is a remarkable amount of "bro-science", "pseudo-medical jargon", and perhaps even "self-diagnosis" to where I'm actually having a hard time discerning what a medical provider told you and what you are telling yourself or just what you interpreted a medical provider said.

I think it should come as a relatively important sign for the better that an orthopaedic spine surgeon, who is able to send his children to college and pay for his mortgage by doing spine surgeries, did not offer you surgery as a definitive treatment. As a provider (a terminal spine pathology provider, at that) he apparently did not see anything in your spine that merited the risks of surgery. To me, that communicates a positive finding, but I can appreciate in others they may see this as meaning they are so far gone that nobody can help them. It is highly unlikely that you are in that latter population.

Being 35 years old, I would be shocked if you didn't have Degenerative Disc Disease. Degenerative Disc Disease is really no more complex than just a metabolic inefficiency in the intervertebral disc where the diffusion of water is not as efficient as it used to be. Other things are definitely at play, but degenerative disc disease is even falling out of diagnostic language because it communicates so poorly with patients. Perhaps DDD would be better thought of as wrinkles in the bony column of the spine.

I am in no position to recommend you take the risk of going through with a surgery that it appears a surgeon told you may not be of any benefit to you.

[coderasm]

There is an awful lot to unpack here. First and foremost, it is readily apparent that you are likely within the subset of the population with very poor self-efficacy and you have a lot of fear-avoidant behaviors and catastrophizing with regards to your pain experience. Even the title of your post is a strong demonstration of this. Without knowing anything else, a clinician would rightfully give you a very guarded prognosis for improvement until you are able to effectively manage these maladaptive personality traits. You made a pretty profound statement (albeit pieced together from two separate parts) that you feel better with training but stopped because you thought you were going to make things worse. Until this thinking trap gets removed, you are likely to continue to spiral down into the abyss.

The next thing is there is a remarkable amount of "bro-science", "pseudo-medical jargon", and perhaps even "self-diagnosis" to where I'm actually having a hard time discerning what a medical provider told you and what you are telling yourself or just what you interpreted a medical provider said.

I think it should come as a relatively important sign for the better that an orthopaedic spine surgeon, who is able to send his children to college and pay for his mortgage by doing spine surgeries, did not offer you surgery as a definitive treatment. As a provider (a terminal spine pathology provider, at that) he apparently did not see anything in your spine that merited the risks of surgery. To me, that communicates a positive finding, but I can appreciate in others they may see this as meaning they are so far gone that nobody can help them. It is highly unlikely that you are in that latter population.

Being 35 years old, I would be shocked if you didn't have Degenerative Disc Disease. Degenerative Disc Disease is really no more complex than just a metabolic inefficiency in the intervertebral disc where the diffusion of water is not as efficient as it used to be. Other things are definitely at play, but degenerative disc disease is even falling out of diagnostic language because it communicates so poorly with patients. Perhaps DDD would be better thought of as wrinkles in the bony column of the spine.

I am in no position to recommend you take the risk of going through with a surgery that it appears a surgeon told you may not be of any benefit to you.

Thank you for responding. Everything I've told you I have discussed with two orthopoedic spine specialist. One of them even used the term loss of muscular sensation when I told him about the partial numbness in the right side of my right foot and the apparent loss of feeling of contracting muscles down the right side of my body. People often don't take a healthy looking young man seriously when he describes the things I have described. I know what's going on with my body. I've had to live inside of it with chronic pain for the last 20 years. The apparent loss of muscular sensation/contraction began about 5 years ago. I'll continue with the program.