[kimmers]

Cfsbugsbunny,

Actually, intractable pain is one of the reasons for doing spinal surgery. BTW, welcome to this forum. I, myself, have found a lot of support on here and it has been a lifeline as i navigate my spine problems. I hope the same happens to you, too.

I know a little bit about how doctors think since I am a nurse. Sometimes, you have to almost literally hit them over the head with a brick until they listen to you. (My apologies to any doctors out there but this is the case a lot of time because that is the way it is.)

Before you fire your doctors, did you tell them how much pain you were in? If you tell them you cannot sleep because of the pain, that usually gets their attention.

You have to really make the doctors aware of what is going on with you as they are not mind readers and need to be told what is happening. Now, pain is a reason to do surgery but first doctors try to find the "pain generator". Because the human spine is extremely complicated and there can be multifactoral generators, finding out what is causing your pain is the goal. A lot of doctors don't get too concerned about bulges in the spine as some people can have disc bulges and be perfectly fine. Other times, a disc bulge can cause severe pain. But you really need to find out what is causing the pain, before you want to do any surgery.

AND you want to treat the symptoms conservatively before you try invasive things like surgery. Unless there is an emergency.
Hence, that is why you are having the epidural, I assume. The epidural is to reduce inflammation at the nerves adjacent to the disc. The goal is that with reducing the inflammation, this should allow your own body to heal. Usually, epidurals are given in a series of three as long as you get some relief from the first one.

Now, if you are in severe pain, you should be treated with medications to reduce that pain. Have you spoken with the pain management, primary or neurosurgeon about this?
There is no need to suffer if you need something stronger than Tylenol to reduce your pain.

I hope this addresses some of your questions you may have. My advice is by no means jump into surgery. If you are thinking about surgery, i would also get more than one opinion.
I'm having surgery soon but this is after months of conservative treatment and ruling out other reasons for my pain and symptoms.

Kimmers