L5-S1 Severe Herniated Disc Story (any advice?)

Hi r/backpain! I'm new here and having an extremely bad introduction to what's likely gonna be chronic pain. This is a long one, I just wanna vent a bit, share my story, and maybe seek any advice from people with similar experiences. It gets a little loopy at the end, I'm very very tired.

I don't know exactly what happened to my back; it might've been a long history of scuffed sleeping posture, working office jobs for years, not lifting laundry baskets properly, or an instance a few months back where I sat on a rotted through bench, or a combo of all of the above. Either way I started experiencing some tingling in my left foot early on (about two months ago) and a weird achy feeling when I would lean over like my back couldn't support my upper body as well, so I went to an express ortho clinic who gave me some prednisone and sent me on my way. Immediately after this, I got extremely sick and was basically bedridden for a week with another round of prednisone, except this time for my lungs.

Once I was feeling fever free, I returned to work for about a week, still feeling a little achey in my body but intending to go back to the ortho clinic. That Saturday I woke up in so much pain that I was dry heaving and dizzy and feverish. It felt like someone was scraping my spine with the nail-puller on the back of a hammer. I remember screaming the entire way down the hall and down the stairs. The pain eased up a bit when I rested, and the express ortho was closed on the weekend, so I went to urgentcare and they gave me some naproxen and robaxin. That got me through the weekend and I went back to the express ortho who found out through an x-ray that I had degenerative disc disease in the l5-s1 region with mild foraminal narrowing. They said it was probably just a bad flare up and that it would improve very quickly with some PT and pain meds.

I went to one session of PT and was feeling optimistic, as I had no frame of reference on how much mild foraminal narrowing should hurt or any frame of reference for any of this at all really. I also got a referral to a proper ortho doctor and I expressed concern with the numbness traveling up my body and into my saddle region and a general feeling something wasn't right; I was basically fed the same 'let your body be your guide' line and told an MRI wasn't probably necessary but if it helped my hysteria I could get one.

Within two days I had an uncontrolled bladder movement when sitting down to pull myself into bed. My parents convinced me I was panicking over nothing and that it would probably be fine until the morning, which very luckily was the case. I called the ortho the next day for something else entirely related to short-term disability through my work and vented to the phone nurse about my cool new symptom of urinary incontinence who told me to go to the ER immediately.

Basically, I couldn't get an MRI at the ER because of a metal retainer in my teeth, so they did a myleogram and pretty immediately spotted a very severely herniated disc in my back. The disc was herniated to the point that the ortho specialist in the hospital said it was likely going to require surgery and immediately wrote a referral to a spinal surgeon.

The surgeon and I had a consult and he let me know that he's very conservative when it comes to spinal surgery, so if I really wanted to I could try injections, but he agreed that it would almost certainly require surgery. I was a little nervous about the concept of surgery and agreed to a middle path where I could try injections for a bit and if they didn't help, I could opt for surgery. The surgeon very emphatically let me know that if I changed my mind at any point all I had to do was call and that he's the primary orthopedic surgeon at the local ER in my network that's on call, so if the pain got too severe or I have any further incontinence I could basically have an emergency option. I felt pretty reassured and satisfied and like I finally had answers and a plan.

Two days after that, the pain was significantly worse. I called the ortho to see if there was anything I could do to be proactive with scheduling the first injection, and I was told by a phone nurse that I would most likely be waiting 6 weeks for my first injection. That obviously made me panic, and with the pain level at that point, I said I wanted to go down the surgical route since it sounded like I'd be waiting two months for something that might not even make any difference. The phone nurse said that surgery was scheduling out til May at the minimum. At that point I was fully panicking. The thought of not being able to walk without a walker or do most ADL/IADLs by myself for another two months if I was very lucky sent me into a full spiral. I called back and spoke with a different phone nurse who was kind enough to actually put a note in for the doctor, and I was pretty immediately put on the surgery schedule for mid March.

So I'm now about a month into this process. I'm on Naproxen and Robaxin and my prescription for Tramadol has run out since the hospital a week ago. Nobody will refill it and the Robaxin is being tapered back, so I'm about to be left with just the Naproxen. I'm in a very significant amount of pain still, luckily not as bad as that first Saturday, but a consistent 6 or 7 since I've been off the Tramadol. My whole body hurts because it only doesn't hurt when I lay on my side with a pillow between my legs, but my side is sore from how much I've been laying on it. I can't feel three of my toes most of the time unless I find a sweet spot and the spasms in my back are constant. It feels like someone's playing the piano on my spine. Without the tramadol, I spend most of my nights just wiggling in bed and trying to find some kind of comfort long enough to fall asleep. Usually this doesn't happen until 4am if it happens at all. I feel it up in my shoulders, too, and I don't know if it's related but my neck hurts and is stiff and I feel a weird pressure in my sinuses, which might just be my body's awful wiring. I've thought something was seriously wrong a few times when I've felt exceptionally dizzy from the medications or lack of sleep. I'm horrified at the thought of spending another month living like this. It's currently 3:12am and I'm so tired and sore and my spine is doing a jig in my back. I don't know what to do.