by Marie-Luise Stromer

Created on: November 02, 2009   Last Updated: September 18, 2010

Spinal Stenosis starts slowly and subtly. Looking back, I can say that the first symptoms showed more than three years ago. I stumbled more than is normal.  One morning on my way to school I stumbled and fell over a curb stone and arrived at my school with bleeding hands. When the secretary was bandaging them, she gave me the advice to have a check for diabetes; she thought I could have had a shock.

The general practitioner didn't find the least hint of diabetes and sent me to a neurologist. He made an electroencephalogram of my brain and measured the electrical activity of my legs. My brain activity was OK, the one in my legs wasn't. He told me that obviously the messages sent off from my brain into my legs didn't arrive properly. Sadly, the man was incapable of interpreting the results, instead of concentrating on the area which interrupted the flow, i.e., my lower back, he was keen on finding out if I suffered from epilepsy. He gave me a calendar into which I should write the dates of further falls so that he could see if there was a pattern. I haven't fallen once since then, I look where I put my feet now and lift them a bit higher, which may look odd but helps.


In my last year at school before retirement I noticed that I had problems moving around in the classroom. When I had to get up from behind my desk and move to the board to write something on it, I did it with difficulty. When I had to walk up stairs, I pulled myself up the railing although I'm not overweight and my heart is in tip top shape.


At the end of the term the disease really set in, just in time to spoil my retirement. When I was walking along a street, it happened more and more often that my feet suddenly became numb and felt heavy, the left one more so than the right one, it was as if I was wearing shoes made of iron. Either together with this numbness or without it the feet tingled as if someone was pricking needles into them. The disturbing thing was that I could never detect what started the sensations, on some days I could walk for nearly one kilometre in the morning and in the afternoon had to stop every 50m - or the other way round, each day was different. I got to know all benches, chairs and low walls downtown where I could rest for some minutes. I know why spinal stenosis is nicknamed 'shop window disease'!


Later I also occasionally got a pain in the buttocks radiating down the legs to the hollow of the knees (the scientific term is 'sciatica') and a general muscle ache as if

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