re-herniation or severe sciatica flare up?

rosette

Hi there,

I'm 3 months post-op from a laminectomy/disktomy on L5-S1. Surgery seemed to go well I have been pain free in my left leg for almost all of the post op recovery of 3 months. In the beginning of May I had a little dull sciatica ache on the side of my leg but it went away after two weeks. Then I went back to no pain. Last week I began to feel a dull ache in my tailbone, I called my neurosurgeon's nurse and she said i may have just moved some ligaments around when I did some gentle stretching. I was going to a chiropractor before surgery and started again 2 months post op. The neurosurgeon said it was fine and he knew of this chiropractor. So the nurse told me to keep my appiontment with the chiropractor because he had been working with me and knows my body. So I saw my chiropractor and told him about the dull pain in my tailbone. He did some adjustments that were a little more aggressive than usual to try to help with the ache. He had been doing very gentle adjustments before because of the sugery. He said that my sacrum was off by a couple of inches and my bottom lumbar joints were locked up and maybe that was what was causing the pain. The next morning I woke up and my entire left leg felt like it was on fire. The pain felt like it did pre surgery. I called the chiropractor and he said that I was having a flare up but it was hard to tell if it was a disc issue or if his adjustments pulled on my muscles and ligments and flared the sciatica nerve up again. It's been 6 days now and I still have the pain...it started out feeling like a burning sensation and now feels like a radiating pain going down me leg and then some tingling at my ankle and the top of my foot. It's painful to stand up or walk or sit. So I've been laying on my side like I did pre surgery. But it's hard to do while taking care of a 2 year old. The nurse of the neurosurgeon said to get an MRI so I went to primary doctor today and she's going to try to get my insurance to approve another MRI. The nurse and the primary care doctor said it could be a really bad flare up of sciatica but sounds a lot like a re-herniation. I'm praying that it's just a flare up. One of the stretches I did was for the pirformis muscle in your butt and it said the stretch recreates the sciatica pain so you must do it very gently. If you do it too aggressively, it can cause unbearable sciatica pain. So I was thinking maybe between that stretch and my chiropractor making stronger adjustments maybe I'm just having a horrible flare up. Has anyone had a bad sciatica flare up like this? How long did it last? What does a re-herniation feel like? I was in the house for 3 days before this happened because it was raining so I didn't do anything active...didn't do any heavy housework or anything so I don't get how I could have re-herniated it. The primary doctor prescribed voltaren for the pain. 800 mg of ibruprofen every 4 hours wasn't helping the pain. Has anyone used voltaren before? So now I just wait fo the MRI approval. I'm so scared about another surgery. I have a 2 year old to take care of - recovery with a 2 year old is so hard. I hate to put her through 12 more weeks of me lying around. And isn't it bad if I have another surgery with scar tissue and the stability of my spine...would it then be impossible to have another baby? I'm so discouraged.