It's such a terrible feeling. I repeatedly herniated the two lowest lumbar discs throughout my 20s and early 30s until it just finally couldn't heal any more. T

It's such a terrible feeling. I repeatedly herniated the two lowest lumbar discs throughout my 20s and early 30s until it just finally couldn't heal any more. Too much volume was lost. It got to the point I was regularly throwing out my back and down for days from nonsense like getting out of a car and emptying the dishwasher. Finally, I threw out my back while putting underwear on one morning, and was suddenly introduced to an entirely new level of pain I didn't realize existed. It was spasms, but not like any kind of muscle spasm I had ever experienced before. They were regular and predictable. Every 30 seconds. It felt like I was being electrocuted, like someone had placed an electrode in my spine and was throwing the switch every 30 seconds. My entire body seized up. I was luckily near a bed and fell onto it, and I was just stuck there. For three days. I didn't sleep. I have no memory of what I ate or drank. For three days, every 30 seconds, an electric shock came from my spine to everywhere else and seized up my entire body. My wife, of course, wanted to take me to the hospital, but I was in too much pain to move, even if someone else was moving me, so I made her wait until the spasms stopped. Then I finally went in, got a steroid shot plus some oral prednisone pills, and eventually, two years, three surgeries, ten screws, two rods, two cages, and a whole lot of physical therapy later, I was basically functional again. I don't really remember it. I can't envision the feeling. I just remember the sheer horror and helplessness. The funny thing is, it's not even actually the worst pain I ever experienced. The worst was waking up after the double fusion, apparently before they started the morphine drip. I don't really remember this, either. It's more like a dream than a memory. My wife saw me. I couldn't see anything. I woke up and was screaming, begging the nurse to kill me, but thankfully this one was brief since I was hooked up to an IV already and she blasted me with fentanyl and I fell asleep and woke up the next time not feeling jack shit. But for maybe twenty seconds or so, I felt like you might imagine it would feel when someone just spent seven hours removing part of your spine, sawing a bone graft off your hip, and screwing a bunch of hardware into your vertebrae while pincers hold you open and your organs are all pulled out and on a table next to you. It's really weird what this does to you. It totally throws off your sense of what is normal. Like should I be in pain right now? I'm laying in a bed unable to sleep. It's a mattress but it feels like I'm laying on stone where the fusion is. My entire left leg is numb and my foot is throbbing. But it doesn't hurt at all. It barely registers as background noise. The muscles that attach there are hard as concrete because they haven't moved in seven years, and they never will move.