By 2019 my acute back pain morphed into sciatica tinkling legs and got me fired from a grueling job (the very job that gave me the back pain in the first place). I gobbled $100 in dodgy eBay “Beat-back-pain” books and hoarded packets of Acetaminophen pills. Only a late physician philosophy and targeted-walking healed me finally.

Bending to pain

For the first six months of 2018, I was employed in a fabrics factory in Montreal, Canada. My daily eight-hour job involved cutting fabrics with a mechanized blade machine, bending and lifting heavy plastic rolls and clothes materials onto shipping cars. I´m a man of a small 55kg frame. This grueling task first broke my right shoulder (tendonitis), and almost slipped my vertebrae disc. At last, the pain became tinkling legs (sciatica).

I developed resistance to Acetaminophen and Naproxen pills to such an extent that each dosage of pills amplified the pain rather than subdue it. With time, I abandoned the pills not out of fear of liver damage, but out of depression. An injured back had left me jobless, unable to my iron shirts, without hospital insurance, and on a $700 welfare check that the government threatened to cut if I didn’t seek a job. (Never mind, I couldn’t type on my cellphone without my fingers twitching pain up my shoulder).
I was physically reduced such that once when I began a relatively mild job of sweeping and dusting carpets in a senior living home for two-hour a day job, the pain flare-up sends me to the emergency room from where I was given the same “Acetaminophen” pills by the doctor!

“If the pain doesn’t subsidize in two days please visit your doctor,” said the gentle physician at Ottawa Hospital while penning me an “MSK lower back” referral letter. Bear in mind that for a patient in muscular pain “visit your personal doctor” is the most dreaded message from a public hospital because it means you are thrown into a “forever in waiting list.” Canada is infamous among developed countries for having the longest wait times to see a personal doctor. Waitlists can stretch up to two years after an initial referral

So, I got frozen on a family doctor waiting list.

Is the pain in my head?

I began to think maybe my extreme feeling of pain was in my head. I was ogled in that direction by the philosophy of the late Dr. John E. Sarno, whose groundbreaking research into Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS) stated that stress, depression, not necessarily injured muscles, could be the chief cause of the most acute of back pains.
 
That is when out of sheer chance, I got a job, as a school crossing guard. The job involved just standing on the road for two hours a day helping kindergarten school kids cross. For someone on back pain meds, it was a lovely stress-free job, no bending, nor lifting anything, just standing on the tarmac wearing a flashing vest. The dilemma; the job paid only $600 which covered rent and left only $4 for pills. The monthly bus pass to go to and from work is $114. I could barely afford it. I was immediately thrown into “bus-pass poverty.”
 
Experimenting with Dr. Sarno
 
So, I decided to put Dr. Sarno´s teaching into practice – to experiment. Every morning, I
begun to walk on foot in minus 10 degree winter to my workplace, and 10km in the evening. I covered 20km on foot daily and began to notice something. The twinkling and electric surges of pain in my legs and lower back began to recede. I thought it was a fluke. I walked to and for work for a further three weeks and the muscles in my legs’ femur strengthened, felt tight, and superb. Something was up. After two months of walking 20km to and from work daily, the knot of pain in my mid-back began to varnish. My right shoulder healed. The more I walked and stood upright directing traffic, my pain melted away. After three months of walking, unable to afford the bus fare, I was strong enough to jog for the first time in a year, I could sleep on my back at night without a whimper of pain, and I could bend to stuff clothes in a washing machine. Stirring plates in the sink didn’t hurt me anymore.
 
“I´m healed! I´m healed, I will avoid surgery,” I wrote my sister, a nurse across the Atlantic in London, UK. “Poor me, lack of bus fare, I walked to work. It sort of healed my back.”
 
She flustered and replied: “Yeah, walking is physiotherapy; sitting is a disability.”
When medication doesn’t make a difference, a targeted walking plan combined with mental health switch could have a transformative effect on our back pain. It´s worth a try.