Chronic back pain doesn’t pick and choose when it encroaches on your life. It can strike at any time, whether you’re at work or you’re out having fun. Eventually, back pain that’s left untreated is liable to impact every aspect of your life, until you don’t have a time when you can simply feel normal and pain-free.
Before she received a minimally invasive lumbar spine surgery at the Spine Institute Northwest, Stephanie Proulx experienced back pain and sciatic nerve pain that followed her everywhere. “I do quite a bit of lifting at work, so [I had] a hard time getting through work,” she remembers. When she made to the end of the day, “I didn’t feel like doing much ’cause I was pretty much spent by the time I got home.”
Stephanie was missing out on life, including taking hikes with her dogs. “It seems like the longer I waited, the worse it got,” she says. If you’re in her position now, she says, “I would just say get it taken care of so you can get back to normal living again.”
A year after her procedure, Stephanie is getting back her life. “Unless I take the dogs for a little bit too long of a hike or something, then I might feel a little something, but usually, it’s usually my knees that hurt now first,” she says. Her back pain and sciatic pain is nearly gone, and Stephanie can finally do what she needs to do—and what she wants to do—without suffering.
Hear more about Stephanie’s story, in her own words: