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Chronic Pain members - Welcome, please introduce yourself

Chronic Pain | Last Active: 54 minutes ago | Replies (7054)

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@jdodd81

Hi, I have had 3 back surgeries in under 2 years. My recent one was a laminectomy on l5-s1 in February 2019. I am having more pain now than before surgery. Nerve pain, tingling, burning and numbness from my back down to my foot. I was just looking to see if anyone has any suggestions or similar experiences. I am also having numbness and tingling in my hand which I find odd. I might want to add that I still have a collapsed disc l5-s1 that was not fixed during surgery. Thanks for any help!

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Replies to "Hi, I have had 3 back surgeries in under 2 years. My recent one was a..."

@jdodd81 I'm a spine surgery patient for a cervical problem and I have thoracic outlet syndrome. I'm curious, what was the reason to do surgery and not address a collapsed disc in the operated area? What direction did the disc herniate and could it have gotten worse since your procedure? The burning pain is a concern, and your surgery was just last month, right? Have you asked your surgeon about this?

The numbness and tingling in your hand could be something like TOS and stress and the inflammation in your body from just having had surgery will increase the symptoms there. I'm guessing that you are not very active right now and walking might be difficult or painful, and that you may not be trying to maintain good posture in all you do. With TOS, a forward head posture, slouching shoulders or bracing against pain can aggravate it, and it's a postural nerve entrapment between the collar bone and rib cage of nerves and the blood supply to your arm. It may have more symptoms at night because of your arm position while sleeping. If you had an injury like a whiplash as a cause of spine problems, you may have TOS and it is more common in spine injury patients.

When you are healed enough for physical therapy, you might want to consider Myofascial release therapy for surgical scar tissue in the fascia. Here is a lot of information about MFR, and a link to find a therapist in this discussion That I created about MFR. This might be something else to ask your surgeon about.
https://connect.mayoclinic.org/discussion/myofascial-release-therapy-mfr-for-treating-compression-and-pain/
Here is some information about TOS https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/thoracic-outlet-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20353988