The reason you haven’t heard much from me over the past couple of months is that I was involved in a car accident on September 17th. I was sitting at a red light when someone rear-ended me. I suspect the driver was distracted because I never saw it coming and had absolutely no time to brace myself. Interestingly, I didn’t experience much of the typical muscular strain you might expect with a car accident. Instead, I felt the impact immediately in my lower back, where I had the lumbar support positioned against my spine. My concern was that the force had affected the ligaments and intervertebral discs. I was particularly unhappy because something similar happened to me about 20 years ago, and I ended up being out of work for approximately six months. That very night, I started experiencing sciatica down the backs of my legs. Over the next week and a half, things progressively worsened. I developed such severe neural tension in both lower extremities that I couldn’t fully extend my knees while walking. My hamstrings felt like they were constantly being pulled, and walking became extremely difficult. Then something else happened that really caught my attention. Approximately nine days after the accident, I flexed my cervical spine forward and suddenly developed tingling, burning, and a profound sensation of heaviness in both upper extremities, including symptoms along the C8 distribution. My arms literally felt like they weighed 100 pounds! As clinicians, we know that bilateral upper-extremity neurological symptoms following cervical trauma raise concerns about potential spinal cord involvement. I immediately assessed my myotomes, which fortunately remained 5/5, but the neurological symptoms were significant enough that I decided to obtain MRIs of both my cervical and lumbar spine. Here’s what the imaging revealed: Lumbar MRI: - Posterior disc protrusion at L5-S1, abutting the thecal sac. - The radiologist described the disc as “approximating” the right S1 nerve root. - This correlates with my predominantly right-sided radicular symptoms, although I also experience neural pain and tension down my left leg.