It didn’t take much for my entire life to flip upside down. When it did, I wasn’t prepared to navigate the immense suffering that lay waiting for me on the other side.
In 2017, I had been a personal trainer for 6 years, teaching Strength and Conditioning in boutique studios, when my L4-L5 disc herniated during a small group class. I’d tried to pick up a small 5 lb weight, a seemingly innocuous motion compared to the deadlift and squatting movements I had regularly been doing.
Knowing that something had gone seriously wrong, I canceled the class and gingerly hobbled out to my car. I sat down and leaned forward to place a small rolled up t-shirt behind my back.
That’s when the full rupture occurred.
A “squirting” sensation burst from my lower back, right where my pelvis and my spine meet. Pain, truly indescribable and incomparable to anything I’d ever experienced, erupted from my spine and shot waves of electric pain into my feet.
I reflexively tried to get out of the car. I tried to swing my legs out of the car, but they wouldn’t budge. My momentum carried me enough that I started to fall out of the car door. In complete shock, I hung from the top of my driver side door with both hands. I screamed for Siri to call my fellow trainers who were going about their daily work routines inside.
If your legs suddenly go weak or numb, or your bladder or bowels change, that’s an emergency. Go to the ER.
Hearing the agony in my voice when they answered my call, two fellow trainers/friends rushed out of the gym to find me in an absolute hysteria, hanging on to the car door.
They put both of my arms on their shoulders and carried me back into a car.
What followed is quite frankly a blur. I laid on the floor of my one-bedroom house, right where my trainers had left me.
Barely able to push myself onto my hands and knees, I peed in water bottles for the next 3 days.
Slowly, I regained movement, and the pain subsided a bit, but I was still in agony.
If your legs ever stop working like mine did, please don’t wait it out on the floor. Go to the ER.
An MRI later confirmed that my L4-L5 disc had sequestered into the spinal canal. It was going to take months, if not years, for this injury to completely heal.
A month later, I began physical therapy. I had high hopes and did everything the PT asked me to do. I was told that my “glutes [were] inactive”. But the more I tried the PT’s exercises pain only seemed to get worse. No matter how engaged I was able to get my glute muscles, the back pain persisted.
After completing a round of PT, I began searching for another physical therapist. When that didn’t change things for me, I found a chiropractor. Every practitioner I saw told me “you’re too young to have this type of injury.”
That winter, I fell into a dark depression. My entire life had been turned upside down. Once a courageous young man, capable of seemingly anything, I had become the antithesis of that person. The girlfriend I had started dating right before my injury was becoming increasingly frustrated with my disability. Getting in the car to go on road trips caused me great anxiety. Sitting for any amount of time caused extreme pain. My once joyful self started slowly draining away. I began to have suicidal thoughts the further I spiraled into pain.
If you’re struggling, call or text 988 (US). If you’re in immediate danger, call 911.
I began to dive deeper into the “movement as medicine” field, taking classes with clinicians in courses with titles like “Lumbar Disc Rehabilitation”. I read everything I could get my hands on to further my knowledge in this field. I partnered with Chiropractors, Physical therapists, D.O’s, massage therapists, and acupuncturists to broaden my knowledge while simultaneously gaining access to various modes of treatment.
Most practitioners I met focused on the area of pain (my low back) as the area that was causing the problem. That’s not anyone’s fault.
It’s okay to go to the doctor, and it’s okay to get surgeries, and it’s okay to get injections.
It wasn’t until I found a coach who helped me broaden my perspective on how the body works that things began to change.
When I stopped viewing the body as the sum-of-its-parts and started thinking about whole-body systems, I finally felt a shift.
Working this way gave my body the opportunity to heal, and I’ve been able to share this perspective with the various clients I work with.
I now see my injury as the greatest gift the universe could have given me, an opportunity to slow down and a chance to learn to listen to the messages my body had been sending me for many years. I hope that hearing a bit about my story with chronic pain and learning to navigate it can be helpful to you in your process.
— Kevin
First posted on my old site in May 2019. Edited in 2026 to match this site’s safety notes and the way I tell the story now.
Education, not medical advice. If something feels wrong, check with your doctor first.
55 minutes, live on Zoom. I do the assessment myself.