I threw my back out a couple of months ago...
I was bent over trying to shift the base some heavy shelves that were stuck in the linoleum. Bad move.
It wasn't as bad as what you went through (I was never confined), but it was painful. I had to move very slowly to get out of a chair or out of bed, and getting into and out of the car, and using the clutch, was very painful. It slowly got better though. By 3 weeks, I was back to normal.
If you can wait, and feel back to normal in 3 weeks, I'd strongly consider putting it off.
The trouble with the physicians is they only see the X-rays and so forth after you have the pain. Who knows what it looked like before - maybe it was the same, maybe it was only a very little different. They don't know.
Physicians don't know much about muscles and how they interact with all the nerves and other stuff.
They may indeed fix you up just fine, and the likelihood of complications is low. But surgical techniques and other treatments do advance over time. Maybe in 5 years they could do the same repairs with less cutting and less recovery time.
The main reason why I say use caution is (as I've mentioned here before) that J has had lots of pain issues in her jaw and upper torso as a result of an old car accident. Some of her physicians were saying she needed extensive dental work, some were saying she needed jaw surgery, some were saying it was the stenosis in her neck vertebrae. The thing that has helped her the most is having someone work on the knots in her muscles.
But take this with a grain of salt. If you couldn't get out of bed, it was much more serious than what I went through. :-)
In any event, make sure you get a second opinion, of course.
Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
