Resipsa

Vin, not only have I been through this, I'm still going through it now as a result of my accident last summer.

I'm curious as to your symptoms, the pain is down the front or the back of your leg? Any pain in your groin? Have you been to see a spinal specialist or just an orthopedist?

Reason I ask is pain in the hip, and correspondingly in the groin, is symptomatic of a problem at L1, not as I understand it at L5. I only know this because that's where my problem is.

As to the injections themselves, I had a series of 3 last year. The amount of relief you get is contingent to a certain extent on the size and nature of the protrusion. Is it just a bulge, or has the disc ruptured?

What the injections are doing is putting the steroids right at the site of the inflammation and swelling to reduce it as much as possible. So how effective they are depends on the amount of the damage done.

For example they worked well for me, and I'm much better than I was, but still have quite a bit of pain being treated with pain killers.

Thats primarily because my spinal doc and the neurosurgeon both told me the same thing. My disc is ruptured, in essence the jelly is out of the doughnut. They told me they consider a large rupture to be .8 mm. Mine is 1.6 cm, so it's about twice the size of what they would consider a large rupture. So the relief you get may be total, depending on how bad the problem is.

The injections themselves are quick, but the pain is sort of intense. Not a very pleasant experience when they actually do it, but it my opinion they work.