Living with Degenerative Disc Disease

When Your Spine Becomes the Treasure

Most of us live as if our bodies are guaranteed.

We bend without ceremony. We lift groceries, carry children, sit too long, stand too fast, and expect the quiet architecture inside us to keep doing its work.

The spine is there through all of it, holding the story upright.

Until one day, it is no longer quiet.

That is the image behind this blog: the spine as treasure. Not in a sentimental way. In the truest sense. More valuable than anything we can buy, wear, collect, or chase. A healthy spine is a form of wealth most people never think to count because it has always been deposited silently into every ordinary day.

Then pain begins to withdraw from the account.

Suddenly, everything you thought mattered has to stand beside the question of whether you can walk across a room or trust your body to carry you into the next decade.

Health has a way of exposing the false gold.

The Diagnosis That Changed Everything

At the end of 2024, I thought I was stepping into a new chapter.

I had moved to Portland, a city I love, and started a promising new job. My life felt like it was beginning to open again. I could picture a version of myself with more room to breathe.

Then, in early January 2025, at 41 years old, I was diagnosed with moderate to severe degenerative disc disease.

Three words that sounded as if they belonged in a chart, yet somehow reached into my future and every simple movement I had taken for granted.

A diagnosis like that does more than name the pain.

It changes the light in the room.

You begin looking at your life through a new lens. A good day feels almost holy. A bad day asks

questions you are not ready to answer.

Before this, I thought of my spine as anatomy.

Afterward, I understood it as only thing truly giving structure to my life.

The Brutal Gift of Perspective

Pain strips life down with brutal efficiency.

Before my diagnosis, I could spend entire days tangled in the usual human worries. Was I where I should be by now? Had I done enough? Had I become the woman I once imagined I would be?

Then my body became uncertain, and those questions changed shape.

Pain rearranged my understanding of happiness. It made the ordinary feel almost extravagant: a room crossed without calculation, a morning that began before the body announced itself, an hour with my children where their voices were louder than my spine. Ease, I learned, is a kind of treasure.

Peace can look embarrassingly ordinary once suffering has taught you how to recognize it.

That may be one of the sharpest gifts this diagnosis gave me. It did not make me less ambitious or less alive. It made me less interested in wasting awe on things that were never worthy of it.

The treasure was never the image of a perfect life.

The treasure was being able to inhabit the life I already had.

The Body Is More Mysterious Than We Admit

One of the strangest parts of this diagnosis has been realizing how miraculous and unknowable the body really is. How can a person walk around pain free while the structure of their spine is deteriorating? How can discs be worn down, dried out, or damaged, while the person carrying them has no idea? And yet it happens all the time.

There are people walking through the grocery store, driving to work, picking up their kids, and living their lives with spinal degeneration they know nothing about. Some only find out by accident, during imaging for something else entirely.

That realization humbled me.

The body is not a simple machine with a warning light that flashes at the first sign of damage. It is stranger and more intelligent than that. It absorbs pressure, reroutes movement, sends signals, muffles others, and sometimes continues holding us together long after something inside has begun to fray.

Degenerative disc disease taught me to see the body with more reverence.

Fragility is only part of the story.

So is resilience.

The Wake-Up Call I Did Not Ask For

I would never have chosen this diagnosis. I would never romanticize chronic pain or pretend fear is a spiritual shortcut.

But I also cannot deny that this experience forced something awake in me.

Before my diagnosis, I carried a sadness I did not fully understand.Some of it came from old trauma. Some of it came from years of surviving with my head above water while mistaking endurance for peace. Purpose felt close enough to sense, yet too far away to hold.

Then pain entered my life like an alarm I could not silence.

At first, all I heard was fear.

Underneath that fear, another truth began to rise.

For the first time in a long time, I understood how badly I wanted to live fully.

Fully. Fiercely. With my whole self involved.

That realization did not arrive like enlightenment. It came more like a match struck in a dark room. Small, bright, stubborn.

Not perform. Not please. Not prove.

Live.

I Refused to Be Defeated

After my diagnosis, something almost irrational rose up in me.

A fierce, stubborn, almost delusional belief that I was going to find a way to get better.

I did not know how much of my pain could improve, or how much of my old life I could reclaim.

But I knew one thing with absolute certainty: Degenerative disc disease was not going to take my life from me without a fight.

I had already survived too much to mistake a diagnosis for a final sentence.

Nearly six months later, I am writing this blog more alive, more focused, and more determined than ever.

That is part of why this blog exists.

The pain is hard. The confusion can be harder. Degenerative disc disease often drops you into a maze of specialists, treatment options, insurance limitations, and half-answers. You're handed fragments when what you desperately need is the whole picture.

So I began building one.

The Medical System Is Not Built for the Whole Person

One of the first questions I had was painfully basic:

Who do I even see for degenerative disc disease?

The answer, I quickly learned, is not simple.

Degenerative disc disease does not fit neatly into one medical category.

It's a whole-body problem. Yet the medical system is often divided into narrow rooms, each one lit by a different specialty.

Doctors are highly trained in their specialties, and that expertise matters. But when you are dealing with a condition that touches multiple systems, no single provider may be able to give you the full map.

I have seen a sports medicine physiatrist, a Regenexx PRP spine specialist, an orthopedic surgeon, an acupuncturist, a chiropractor, a pain management specialist, a podiatrist, and a physical therapist.

Each one gave me a different piece of the puzzle.

No one gave me the whole picture.

I had to build that myself.

Why You Have to Become Your Own Advocate

This is one of the hardest truths I've learned:

No one is coming to manage your diagnosis for you.

That does not mean good doctors do not exist. They do. I have met providers who were thoughtful, skilled, and genuinely helpful. But doctors are people. They have limited time. They have their own training, biases, pressures, and blind spots. Many are not as current on emerging research as patients assume.

The truth is that doctors work within systems shaped by insurance, billing codes, limited appointment windows, and outdated treatment models.

That means you cannot afford to be passive.

You have to ask questions, track your symptoms, and understand your imaging.

Regenerative Care, Traditional Care, and the Tension Between Them

One of the most confusing parts of navigating degenerative disc disease is understanding the difference between traditional pain management and newer regenerative approaches.

Traditional options often include medications, steroid injections, physical therapy, and in more severe cases, surgery. These treatments absolutely have a place, and for some people, they are necessary.

Regenerative treatments, including PRP, belong to a different conversation. They are designed to support healing and potentially reduce the need for more invasive interventions.

That shift is hopeful, but it also creates tension.

What is best for the patient is not always what insurance covers.

Furthermore, what gives patients more options may also challenge older models of treatment.

That does not mean one path is always right and another is always wrong.

It means patients deserve to know the full range of possibilities.

We deserve more than a rushed appointment and a prescription.

We deserve a real conversation about healing.

The Strange Grace Inside the Struggle

There have been unexpected turns in this journey.

One of them was coming to an understanding with my abusive ex-husband, who kept me on his insurance plan so I could access free PRP treatments through his employer. Given our history, that was not something I expected. But life is complicated. Healing is complicated. Sometimes help comes through imperfect circumstances and surprising people.

This diagnosis has humbled me in ways I am still trying to understand.

It has made me more grateful, more awake and less interested in pretending.

I do not sweat the small stuff the way I used to. Not because I have become magically enlightened, but because I now know the difference between a bad day and the fear of losing your ability to live freely in your own body.

That kind of fear changes you.

But it can also clarify you.

A Chronic Pain Diagnosis Is Not the End

A diagnosis of chronic pain does not mean a life of pain.

Read that again.

A diagnosis of chronic pain does not mean a life of pain.

It may mean your path becomes more complicated. But it does not mean you are doomed.

Recovery begins to feel less impossible when you learn your body’s patterns, build the right team, ask sharper questions, and collect the tools that help you feel less helpless inside your own life.

You can strengthen, adapt, heal, and reclaim parts of yourself you feared were gone.

One of the simplest places to start is with a pain journal. Track everything: what you feel, when you feel it, what you ate, how you slept, how you moved, what stressed you, what helped, and what made things worse. Over time, patterns will begin to emerge. And patterns are power.

Because the more you understand your body, the less helpless you feel inside it.

Final Thoughts

This blog exists for anyone who has received a diagnosis that made the future feel smaller.

I want you to know this:

You are not broken beyond repair or powerless.

Your spine is precious. Your body is precious. Your life is precious.

And even here, in the ache, there can still be alchemy.

Degenerative disc disease has been one of the most frightening experiences of my life.

It has also changed the way I understand my body.

I used to think treasure was something you found outside yourself.

Now I know better.

The body is a sacred inheritance we often learn to value only after it begins asking for our attention.