4 weeks

Not much new to report.  I think I'm still doing pretty well at this activity level.  I still have some pain in my right hip but only when I do a straight leg raise, which is pretty easy to avoid in everyday life so it is not much more than an annoyance.  I am still doing the nerve flossing stretches in case it is scar tissue causing the hip pain.  These stretches aim to keep the sciatic nerve moving along in its channel to avoid/break up scar tissue from adhering to the nerve and causing pain.  It could also just be residual swelling/irritation from the surgery.  I had something similar after my first discectomy surgery earlier this year and it eventually went away (before the reherniation).  I've also been keeping up with my walking regiment, but a day or two a week I'll skip the longer walk to give myself a rest day.  I still get pretty tired easily, especially after a longer walk or in the afternoons and I have some pain in my abs when I do anything to utilize them.  I'm also still wearing the DVT socks, but I think I've gotten used to them and they don't itch as much anymore, but I'm still looking forward to them going away in 2 more weeks.

Tonight I went out with some friends for one of their birthdays and sat for a few hours total with a couple of short breaks just to stand up for a few seconds and then we went to a concert and stood for a couple hours as well.  I did not feel any additional pain from this, but I still plan to be careful and treat nights like this as special occasions and not push it.  It was the most sitting and standing I've done continuously without a break to lay down since well before my surgery.

Another odd fun fact is that I hadn't sneezed since the week after my surgery until tonight.  Right after the surgery, when I sneezed, I could definitely feel something hard/strange in my back which I can only assume was the vertebrate rattling a bit against the disc.  It didn't really hurt that much, but it was an unsettling/foreign feeling.  I have a little trick to short circuit my sneezes so I had been using it for the past couple weeks.  Well, tonight one finally snuck out and I did not have any strange feeling at all.  It felt completely normal.  I'm not sure this is any kind of clinical benchmark, but I'm treating it as one for myself.