What Caused My Degenerative Disc Disease? Pregnancy, Abuse, and Chronic Back Pain

What Caused My Degenerative Disc Disease?

Anyone diagnosed with degenerative disc disease at a young age knows the question that comes next. Why? Why did this happen to me?

I wanted the story to have a hinge, some obvious moment where my body crossed from healthy into damaged. A dramatic injury, some clean before-and-after event, would have given my mind a place to set the blame down.

After my diagnosis, I found myself mentally retracing my entire physical history, searching for the origin story of my pain. Instead, I found myself walking backward through years of my life with no map, searching for clues in all the seasons when my body was asking for care but life kept handing me more to carry.

Some people can point to a clear event. For others, like me, the answer is much harder to name.

Maybe it was accumulation. Maybe the body keeps its own record, quietly, until pain becomes the language one can no longer ignore.

The hardest part is that I may never know exactly what caused it. My story does not feel like a lightning strike. It feels more like weather moving in slowly, pressure gathering over time until the foundation began to shift.

Why Degenerative Disc Disease Can Happen at a Young Age

Degenerative disc disease is still poorly understood, especially when it appears in younger people.

We tend to think of spinal degeneration as something that happens after decades of hard labor, aging, or obvious physical trauma. And yet young people, even people in their twenties, can develop it without any dramatic injury at all.

That contradiction can make the diagnosis feel even more unsettling.

If no one can clearly explain why it happened, your mind starts trying to solve the mystery on its own. You replay your life like evidence. You inspect every hard season, every ignored symptom, every physical strain, every period of stress, every time you carried too much.

And sometimes the medical world makes that worse.

One chiropractor reacted to my X-ray with visible shock. He could not seem to understand how someone young and otherwise healthy could have degeneration that severe. He told me my spine looked like it belonged to someone who had been in a major car crash or fallen from a building.

Maybe he thought he was being factual. But when you are sitting there in pain, scared, and trying to process a life-changing diagnosis, curiosity without compassion can feel cruel.

I did not need someone to marvel at the damage.

I needed someone to remember there was a human being attached to the spine.

That moment taught me something important: when you have a rare or severe diagnosis, not every provider will know how to hold the emotional weight of it. Some will speculate. Some will project. Some will make you feel like a medical puzzle instead of a person.

And in those moments, you have to steady yourself, and come back to the present.

Because you can spend the rest of your life asking, “How did this happen?” and still never get a clean answer.

At some point, the better question becomes:

What can I do now?

Can Pregnancy Cause Degenerative Disc Disease or Chronic Back Pain?

Before I understood my spine, I understood exhaustion.

Motherhood had trained me to keep moving long after my body started asking for mercy. Pain did not arrive like a lightning strike. It gathered quietly in the places I kept using because there was no other option: the lower back that lifted children out of cribs, the hips that carried groceries and babies, the core I assumed would simply find its way back.

For a long time, I treated the ache like background noise. It was part of the room. Part of bedtime. Part of hauling little bodies through ordinary days. When you are the parent everyone reaches for, your own pain can become strangely easy to ignore. You keep answering the call because the people you love are small, urgent, and depending on you.

Only later did I understand that my back had been compensating for years. The story begins before the diagnosis, before the hospital visit, before I had language for degenerative disc disease. It begins with pregnancy, birth, recovery that never got fully protected, and a body asked to keep giving before it had a chance to come back to itself.

My first son was sunny-side up, meaning he was positioned face up instead of face down during labor. That led to intense back labor. I pushed for hours in horrible pain before the emergency C-section. When he was finally born, his head was shaped like a cone from the force of the contractions and pushing. My second son was also delivered by C-section.

After both births, I believe my abdominal muscles were deeply weakened. My core was not functioning the way it should have been, and without realizing it, I began relying more and more on my back.

This is one of the cruel realities of motherhood: your body goes through something massive, and then almost immediately, life asks you to keep giving.

There is rarely a true pause. For many women, the recovery period is too short, the village is too small, and no one is standing at the door saying, “Your body has been through trauma. Let us protect it while it heals."

Motherhood entered my body as weight, motion, and interruption. A baby against my chest. Sleep broken before it could become sleep. The house asking me to bend, lift, carry, answer, soothe. My toddler reached for me as though my body had no limits, and I wanted so badly for that to be true. What looked from the outside like an ordinary day was, inside my spine, a series of small negotiations I kept losing.

And because you love your children, you do it.

You override yourself.

Again and again.

The Postpartum Recovery I Was Never Given

After my second C-section, there was no real recovery waiting for me. The surgery was treated like something that had already happened, while my body was still inside the aftermath of it. I had come through pregnancy and major abdominal surgery; I was stitched, depleted, bruised by anesthesia, and then expected to keep functioning as if healing could happen in the margins.

What my body needed was basic, biological mercy: sleep when it could get it, protection from constant demand, and the presence of someone who understood that recovery was not indulgence. It was the work my body had to do to survive what it had just endured.

Instead, I was met with resentment. My abusive ex-husband became angry that I needed help with the baby while I was still in the hospital recovering from surgery. He yelled because I needed sleep and asked him to stay awake with the baby so I could rest.

That moment stayed with me because it revealed something I did not fully understand at the time: my body was expected to perform before it was allowed to heal. I had been cut open, then sent back into the noise of need as though the wound were only a detail.

The nurse heard him yelling and came into the hospital room. She had to explain that I needed sleep in order to recover. A medical professional had to say what should have been obvious: a woman recovering from surgery needed rest, care, and support.

Looking back, I see that moment as one of the earliest places where my body’s needs were treated like an inconvenience. I absorbed that message. I pushed through pain and exhaustion. I learned to keep going because stopping created conflict. I overrided my own body because needing help was treated like a burden.

That kind of stress learns the layout of your life. It comes home with you, sits beside the crib, waits in the dark when you are trying to sleep. Your body begins to brace before anything has happened, trained by repetition to expect anger, withdrawal, or another demand. Rest stops feeling like a place you are allowed to enter. Help feels dangerous to ask for. Pain becomes private, folded small enough that no one else has to be inconvenienced by it.

I cannot say that the lack of support after delivery caused my degenerative disc disease. Bodies are too complex for that kind of certainty. But I can say this: my body was denied the recovery, softness, and support it needed after childbirth. When I look back at the years that followed — the pain, the carrying, the stress, the emotional strain, the way I kept overriding myself — I understand that my spine was not the only thing under pressure. My entire life was.

Chronic Pain After Pregnancy: The Signs I Missed

As a new mother, I carried both of my sons constantly.

Because I am left-handed, I almost always placed them on my left hip. I did not think much of it at the time. Most mothers do not. You hold the child where it feels natural. You shift your weight. You keep moving. You do what works.

Until one day, what “works” becomes what wears you down.

Two years after my second son was born, we moved into a house with a steep staircase. I carried him up and down those stairs on my left hip over and over again. He was close to thirty pounds at the time and strong for his age. My frame is petite, and my body was already depleted.

I can see now how much strain I was putting through one side of my body.

But at the time, I was not thinking about biomechanics.

I was thinking about getting through the day.

I was trying to mother inside a body that needed care, while also managing the invisible courtroom that seemed to follow me everywhere. I worried that pain would be mistaken for weakness, exhaustion for failure, hesitation for proof that I was not enough. So I kept reaching down, lifting up, smiling through it, determined not to become the woman people judged for needing help.

I felt pressure from society, strangers, friends, and family to carry my son like other mothers did.

When I hesitated because I was in pain, I felt judged.

So I pushed through. I dismissed my own pain for the sake of appearances.

That sentence hurts to write because I know how many women will recognize themselves in it.

Could SI Joint Pain Be Connected to My Degenerative Disc Disease?

When I described my hip and butt pain to my pain management doctor, he immediately brought up the SI joint. He explained that during pregnancy, the SI joint and surrounding soft tissues can become more lax to make room for the baby. Sometimes, he said, the joint does not return to its previous state, and women can develop chronic pain after childbirth.

He seemed more focused on the SI joint than the degenerative disc disease.

That has been one of the hardest parts to make sense of. Each provider held up a different pane of glass, and my body changed shape depending on the angle. Through one lens, the problem was the discs. Through another, the SI joint. Then came posture, gait, inflammation, weakness, stress — each one possibly real, each one incomplete on its own. I was left trying to stitch the fragments into a body that still had to move through the day.

And honestly, maybe they are all seeing part of the truth.

A change in the pelvis affects the spine. A weakened core affects the back. A rotated gait affects the hips. Pain changes movement. Stress changes muscle tension. Exhaustion changes posture. Fear changes breathing. Trauma changes how safe we feel inside our own skin.

Nothing happens in isolation.

The Link Between Emotional Stress and Chronic Pain

At first, when I thought about what may have triggered my degenerative disc disease, I mostly thought in physical terms. But the deeper I look, the more I understand that my body was not just carrying children. It held stress, emotional pressure, and the daily labor of staying regulated inside chaos while trying to protect my children from it.

Old journal entries from that period of my life reveal a woman documenting fear, conflict, harshness, blame, lack of accountability, and emotional instability in the home. I see a mother trying to absorb chaos so her children would not have to. I see someone constantly scanning the environment, trying to prevent the next blowup, trying to soften the next harsh moment and make sure everyone okay.

Even then, life kept asking my body to carry, bend, lift, endure, and keep the day moving as if nothing inside me was breaking down.

I do not believe emotional abuse alone “caused” my degenerative disc disease. Bodies are far more complicated than that, and I would never reduce a spinal diagnosis to one emotional explanation.

But I do believe this: Long-term stress changes how we live in our bodies.

It changes how we breathe, sleep, move. And if you spend years surviving instead of being supported, eventually the body may begin to tell the truth you were not allowed to say out loud.

When Pushing Through Chronic Pain Becomes a Survival Pattern

There is a specific kind of damage that comes from constantly overriding your own needs.

You can feel pain while someone needs you, exhausted with no backup, and still have to stay composed. So you keep going.

That kind of strength can be necessary for a season. Then it becomes a cage.

Pushing through taught me how to function while disconnected from myself.

I could feel pain and still perform. Then one day, my body refused to participate in the performance.

The diagnosis forced me to confront the cost of all that endurance. Pain was no longer something I could fold into the day and keep hidden. It had become the messenger standing in the doorway, refusing to leave. I used to think ignoring pain made me strong. Now I see it differently.

My body was not betraying me by hurting.

It was trying, in the only way it could, to interrupt a pattern that had gone on too long.

How I’m Moving From Blame to Healing

When it comes to the true trigger of my degenerative disc disease, your guess may be as good as mine.

I cannot point to one moment and say: there. That was where it began. Pregnancy changed the architecture. Childbirth asked my core to survive more than I understood at the time. Motherhood kept loading the same vulnerable places, while emotional stress trained my body to tighten, tolerate, and keep quiet. The truth may be less like a single injury and more like sediment: layer after layer, until the weight finally became visible.

There is a point where investigation turns into punishment.

I cannot heal while cross-examining every version of myself who did not know what I know now.

I am done using my past as a courtroom.

Not am I interested in spending the rest of my life putting every memory on trial.

The question of what I should have done differently leads nowhere but grief.

The younger mother carrying her baby up the stairs was doing her best. The woman recovering from surgery without enough support was trying to survive. The person who ignored pain was not careless. She was overwhelmed, under-supported, and trained to keep going.

I can honor the past without living inside it.

I can tell the truth without becoming consumed by it.

I can recognize what happened to my body without blaming myself for not knowing then what I know now.

What I’m Doing Now to Support My Spine Health

My energy belongs to repair now.

That means strengthening the muscles that support my spine, correcting mechanical issues where I can, exploring treatments like PRP, staying informed about clinical research, tracking pain patterns, and listening to my body sooner.

More than anything, it means practicing respect.

Fear treats the body like an enemy. Shame treats it like a failure. Respect listens before the scream.

My body has carried me through childbirth, motherhood, stress, heartbreak, emotional survival, and pain. It has endured seasons I am only now beginning to understand.

For a long time, I saw its symptoms as obstacles.

Now I see them as information.

Pain became the flare my body sent into the dark.

A signal bright enough that I finally had to turn toward it.

You Are Not Broken: Finding Hope After a Degenerative Disc Disease Diagnosis

I may never know exactly what triggered my degenerative disc disease.

But I know this diagnosis has forced me to become honest.

Honest about the ways I ignored my own pain because I thought I had no other choice.

If you are reading this and searching for the origin of your own pain, I want you to know that it is natural to want answers. It is natural to replay the past. It is natural to wonder what you missed.

But please do not turn your diagnosis into a weapon against yourself.

You did the best you could with the information, support, and capacity you had at the time.

Now you know more.

And knowing more means you can choose differently.

Healing asks for participation, not perfection. It asks you to listen sooner, question more honestly, move with care, and stop mistaking endurance for wisdom. Somewhere along the way, your body has to become more than the thing that carries you through pain.

Because it is.

Your body is not just the place where pain lives.

It's the place where healing begins.