@diegory

That brings back a lot of memories for me. I have severe lumbar stenosis found during an emergency CT-scan about 10 years ago. I was on prednisone but apparently my dose wasn't high enough. I took more like 100 mg of prednisone when I was confronted with the possibility of an emergency lumbar fusion.

The spine surgeon was reluctant to do surgery because of all the Prednisone I had been on. He wanted a bone scan done first to see if there was enough good dense bone in my spine to hold all the hardware that would fuse my spine. The surgeon said I was NOT a good surgical candidate because of being on Prednisone.

After the bone scan, I needed an EMG/NCS just do "delineate the damage" to my spinal nerves before surgery. I didn't have caudal equina symtoms that time but that happened a few years later. The first time I learned about my spinal stenosis because I didn't know that I had a bad back. I had problems with foot drop and radiating leg pain that was so severe I would have signed a consent to amputate my leg. I was dragging one leg when I walked into the emergency room.

In any case, my rheumatologist wasn't so happy that I took so much Prednisone. She said a localized steroid injection would have been a better choice than systemic oral prednisone. She was glad the pain stopped though. The EMG/NCS showed that the damage wasn't so severe to need emergency surgery so did physical therapy instead of the surgery.