Degenerative Disc Disease at 27

Diagnosed formally at age 24, it’s been Hell

Degenerative Disc Disease is a pretty common diagnosis and seems to be becoming more common for the younger generations

I have had back pain in some shape or form since I was around fourteen years old. At the time, I attributed it to stress. I had my first pain attack (a very large sudden spike of pain that felt like electrical convulsions in my lower back is the best way to describe it at the time) was when I was fifteen. I was walking to class when the pain suddenly seemed to hit me out of nowhere. I was in so much pain that I just about crawled to the nurse's office. Every step was incredibly painful. The nurse saw me, laid me down on the mini bed, and called my parents, telling me to pick me up and to have me on bed rest for a minimum of two days. The nurse suspected my backpack was too heavy and had poor design for my back, so we switched me to an over-the-shoulder back pain and it’s been that way for backpacks ever since. However, at age 27, I still go through regular back pain.

When I approached my doctor as a teenager, they thought it was attributed to stress. They kept telling me “You are too young to have serious back problems now.” However, looking back on the continuous growing pain, I strongly suspect the degenerative disc disease (DDD) was there since my mid-late teens. I horseback rode from ages (roughly) 8–16. The first half of that was me learning to show jump (the horses would jump right…