It was 2:47 AM on a Tuesday.
I woke up to my wife Margaret sobbing on the bathroom floor. Not crying. Sobbing.
Curled in the fetal position. Her hand gripping her hip so hard the knuckles had gone white.
"I can't do this anymore, Michael. I can't live like this."
The burning had hit again. That fire that starts in the lower back and shoots down the leg like a hot blade dragged along the nerve.
I knelt next to her. I held her hand. And I had nothing to offer her.
Fifty-five years of training. And I couldn't help my own wife off the floor.
Everything my training had taught me gave her two hours of relief at best. And the experts weren't any better.
Aleve and ibuprofen until her stomach turned on her and they added Prilosec to protect it. A 14-week wait for physical therapy and four photocopied stretches she did every morning even though the fire came back by dinner. Epsom salt baths that gave her twenty quiet minutes, then left her scared to climb out of the tub. Acupuncture that relaxed her for an afternoon. Two cortisone shots, the first good for seven weeks, the second for nine days.
Then gabapentin, which turned her into a stranger. Foggy. Asleep by 8 PM. Drugstore creams that smelled medical and did nothing under the skin. And the leg still burned.
When the doctor reached for the pad again, the next word was the one that scared us both. An opioid. We'd seen what those did to people we knew. She refused it.
No one told her why each treatment wore off faster than the last. Hold onto that. It matters later.
Then he suggested magnesium. She took it faithfully for eleven months. The basic bottle, then the high-absorption one, then the blend with ten forms in one capsule.
By month eleven she'd spent close to $390. The burning got worse.
So she had her level tested. It came back squarely in the optimal range. Fine, he said. You can stop the capsules.
She sat in the Costco parking lot and cried.
Think about what that blood test said. She'd swallowed a mineral every day for eleven months. The blood was perfect. The leg was worse.
How can both of those be true at the same time?
No one answered that. Hold onto that question too.
Then the spine surgeon recommended a $65,000 fusion. Six-inch scar. Months of recovery. And a 40% chance the burning came back anyway.
Something in me snapped. I wasn't going to let anyone open my wife's spine for a problem I wasn't sure it would fix. I went to war with everything I thought I knew about sciatica.