The last quarter of 2025 was a bit of a mess for me health-wise. It started in October with some kind of sciatic nerve disruption that left me essentially crippled and, on some days, crawling on the floor to move about. It ended with me in the Daly Pavilion for mental abnormality reasons.
But the sciatic nerve pain remains, albeit far less disruptive than it was back in October. The rough diagnosis there is disruption of the stability of my spine with lots of degeneration in the lower back. The strongest recommendation other than pain killers was to see a physiotherapist, so I’ve been going to one for a month and a bit now.
My current state
I was on gabapentin, about 2400 mg per day, to deal with the pain prior to my mental breakdown in December. The interesting thing to me is that the pain became far more manageable once I was in the hospital. They actually took me off of gabapentin entirely by around December 25 or so, and still the pain remained manageable.
My routine was that the pain would wake me up at night, I would walk around the ward for ten minutes or so until the pain became tolerable, then I’d go back to sleep. This implied to me at least that the pain could probably be corrected or managed via the recommended physio: of course, that wasn’t part of my treatment at the time.
When I was released from the Daly Pavilion on January 6th I immediately booked myself in to a private physiotherapy provider. The one I picked was Saber Physiotherapy here in Castlegar. So far I am happy with this choice.
What physio is doing
Physiotherapy focuses on helping the patient correct their own biomechanics problems by identifying malfunction, designing conditioning exercises, and regularly reviewing progress.
There is some physical manipulation as with chiropractic, but the intent is completely different. Instead of trying to forcibly shift the spine or a joint back into a functional alignment, physio aims to work with the patient to rebuild maladjusted motion and posture to cause the realignment to happen naturally.
As for myself, I have three points of degeneration in the spine. Cervical spine C4-C5-C6 show signs of osteoarthritis with bony spurs and micro-fractures. There is some degeneration in the lower thoracic spine, and then another block of degeneration at the very base of the lumbar spine adjacent to the sacral and iliac joint.
Per the physiotherapist, my spine has functionally ‘collapsed’, with the worst disruption being in the lumbar spine. The vertebrae there are concave to the right with a Cobb angle of about 15 degrees. Confusingly, “concave to the right” means the spine bends to the left, also know as levoscoliosis.
Note that I am trying to interpret medical documents here and am not a doctor, so mistakes may be plentiful. Basically, the way I parse this: the tensioning ‘lines’ (muscles and tendons) on the left side of the spine are pulling really hard causing the spine to bend towards the left, producing a concavity on the right side.
Also per the physio, this is mechanical i.e.: not caused by a disease or birth defect but by the body’s own tension / muscular systems. My left side lower back is rigid like a board and has no room to flex further. I ‘curve’ to the left forming a concavity on the right and have lost a couple of inches of height as a result.
The future
Correcting the problem means re-training the body to undo the maladaptation it has developed. Likely the overly tight/rigid muscles and tendons on the left side got that way trying to protect the body from some kind of injury, and are now ‘stuck’ in that state. Often this kind of ‘one-sided’ bend is accompanied by a forward lean e.g.: leaning over a keyboard and not giving the back the chance it needs to unlock. The exact involvement of the sciatic nerve is unclear- it runs along and through the vertebrae that are out of alignment, and also goes through the big muscles in that area.
Much of my assigned exercising involves stretching to. unlock the lower back muscles and re-align the spine. Progress is and will likely remain slow. My goal is to restore my spine to a more healthy alignment and, if possible, correct the compression that is possibly inflaming my sciatic nerve.
So far I’ve “made some progress” but three sessions doesn’t exactly give much opportunity to correct what is likely years of degeneration. I would be surprised if I consider myself ‘cured’ at any point in 2026. But I do expect more progress, and that is good enough for me.
