As you all know, my fiancé and I were living in Sonoma, California, while he was working as a wine-making intern. We returned to Iowa at the beginning of November and drove for three days to get home. I was super excited to be taking a road trip with the love of my life as we began our lives as an engaged couple, but that was ruined by the unexpected.
At the time of this post, I have been going on four months of chronic back pain.
As we neared the end of our time in Sonoma, my lower back was continuously aching, and I would have random shocks of pain down my left leg. Without departure quickly approaching, I decided to go to Somona Urgent Care to see if I could get some help managing the pain while we drove home. I received two different muscle-relaxing medications and a muscle-relaxing shot before being sent on my way. The nurse barely touched me or examined me, and gave me the advice of sitting and stretching before sending me on my way. Throughout this entire one-hour visit, I could not sit in the chair or on the exam table because it hurt so badly. Even though I had only asked for help to be comfortable on the three-day drive home, they didn’t do very much for me.
As we began driving, I tried to be as comfortable as possible in the passenger seat. Thankfully, I was usually able to make it 2-4 hours before needing to stop and walk around to ease the pain. This usually coincided with gas station stops and meals, where I would be walking around as much as possible while we were out of the car. At this point, the meds were barely helping, and I was beginning to react to the meds with a high heart rate and a cheek flush. When we got to our second hotel in Wyoming, I stopped taking the meds altogether because I was dizzy from such a high heart rate. After stopping the meds, the side effects went away, and I realized that those meds were never helping with my pain to begin with.
After returning to Iowa, I fought the pain for a few more days before finally deciding to go to physical therapy to try to figure out what was going on. I suspected a tight muscle or some other muscular issue. After a few appointments, my pain was still not getting better, and I decided to go to urgent care again to see if they could take an X-Ray to take a look. Their X-Ray did not find anything, and they advised me to continue to do physical therapy and to see a Sports Medicine doctor. I did as they said, and the doctor found a tight muscle higher in my back, but it turned out to be unrelated to my lower back pain.
At this point, I’m super frustrated with the pain, a few misdiagnoses, and the contact travel with the holidays. It was at that point that I knew something else was going on, and I needed to go back to the Sports Medicine Doctor.
The doctor did another X-Ray, which was when I found out that the first urgent care did not image the correct location, and found a little bit of disk degeneration. He then ordered an MRI to get a deeper look. That first MRI showed something different that did not fully show up due to the location of the imaging. A second MRI was ordered, and a few weeks later, a potential answer to my pain was discovered… a small mass inside my sacral bone.
At this point, I was advised to stop physical therapy, and the hunt for a specialist began.
Unity Point originally referred me to a bone tumor doctor who works at the University of Iowa Hospital. He is known to be the best in the state, so you can imagine my shock when he decided to refer me to Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.
At this point, I am waiting for an insurance appeal to help cover the cost of a visit to Mayo before I plan to go.
I will keep you all updated with more information soon.