The real life limp drag.
Let’s go back to the very beginning where 2020 started to really turn it up a notch.
During lockdown it was me and the cat living the isolation life in my London flat. I am incredibly lucky for the private garden that I have and it essentially became my outdoor gym. I was training 1-2 times a day, cleaning, jerking, deadlifting with many a burpee thrown in the mix and was feeling the fittest I had for a long time. But one afternoon in May, it all went a tad wrong.
In going to lift the barbell I felt a sudden stab in my back. Roll on to the night and I was crippled with sciatica that had me awake for over 24 hours. I was plugged with painkillers and anti-inflammatories but essentially told the classic ‘see how it goes’. The next day I had developed quite literally a real life limp drag. My leg had completely gone. No movement in my foot. All the little piggies had gone to the market, eaten a lot of carbs and currently in a coma and no matter how much I stared at my leg and willed it too move there was nothing.
I found an old pair of crutches and causally Uber’ed myself to A&E. Due to covid you get asked on the door ‘how can we help you’ before you’re allowed to go in and I got a bit of a funny look when I said “Well…I think I might need to get checked out as I currently can’t move my leg…”. It was full steam ahead until we hit a bit of a road block with the radiology team.
“Is she incontinent?”
“No”
“It’s not an emergency she can come back tomorrow”.
Now I’m no doctor, but the fact I hadn’t pissed my pants but I was paralysed on one side kind of makes me think this was an emergency… but no matter how hard the A&E docs tried, they couldn’t get me a scan that night. So I got sent home with the instruction of ‘do not move’ and come back the next day for an MRI. Limp dragging myself into radiology the next day, I had the scan and yet again got sent home to await the results in the ‘next few hours’. 3 days of chasing them and getting told “no news is good news” I finally got a phone call at 10.30pm.
“Miss Whitfield you have my deepest apologies, you should not of been sent home and somehow the scan got missed. The neurosurgeon has asked me to call you immediately, you need to come in tomorrow first thing fasted for surgery”. Not the best Friday night I’ve ever had that’s for sure.
Still not knowing what on earth I’d actually done, I took myself into hospital the next day in a bit of daze. I had herniated my L4-L5 disc, which was leaking out and compressing on the nerve. The longer it was going on for the more it was getting compressed. But the fact I still had pain was apparently a good thing as no pain equals no more nerve…not sure how reassuring that actually was! From there it was case of going through the procedure and signing on the dotted line.
Weirdly, in that moment I didn’t feel scared. Apart from the searing pain in my back, I was just completely numb. There wasn’t really much time to think about it, I knew I needed it done and so auto-pilot switched on and full throttle ahead. I wasn’t enjoying setting the limp drag trend so all I could think was lets get this sorted and get the piggies back from market. The surgery itself was quite the interesting experience and I will be writing a very open honest account of the day in the life of a spinal patient so look out for that!
