About nature’s way to tell me ‘Take it easy, luv!’ and the best treatment for sciatic pain in London

The first time it hit me, I was walking down Islington’s Upper Street, 2struggling under the weight of too many shopping bags, mobile phone in one hand, clutching files in the other. The pain was sharp, sudden and so strange, it made me laugh out loud. Did somebody just shoot my bum?

I limped back home, unable to put pressure on my right foot and swearing with each step. I rang Francesca Topolski, an angel with a diploma in kinesiology and cranio-sacral therapy, and she gently rocked, jiggled and wiggled the twisted pelvis in its proper location.

A few days later the pain had miraculously disappeared and I filed my experience under ‘inexplicable curiosities of early pregnancy’. Little did I know, that this was just a tiny foretaste of what my sciatica had in store for me.

The second attack didn’t come with the same edge, as I wasn’t that surprised anymore. I knew my enemy. And I expected him to back off, with Francesca’s help and if only I managed to ignore him. But he wouldn’t. Instead he made himself at home in the back of my leg, got
comfortable around my lower spine, made my coccyx feel like mashed potatoes and, of course, fired little thunderbolts into my butt cheek. In my heroic try to ignore the pain, I only gave in when lifting a cup of tea ended in tears. Living in denial resulted in my whole back getting stiff and demanded fiercer intervention.

So I turned to acupuncture. If you are going to give birth at the UCLH/Bloomsbury Birth Centre, there is a brilliant midwife doing acupuncture at the hospital. Her name is Ena. But like everything on the NHS, resources are stretched and you have to be really lucky to get under her healing hands before the pain drives you mad.

If you happen to have some spare cash, or if you just decide you cannot bear crying any longer each time you blow your nose, David Charlaff is the guy for you. With a few vigorous ‘hugs’ and some nasty clicking noises, the debilitating stiffness from my back had been released. His treatment crowned in some decorative needles pricked alongside the back of my whole body, encouraging the inflammation of my sciatic nerve to disappear. Which it did, at least until last Monday.

I am now trying a new cure: actually listening to the message my body tries to get to me and rest, rest, rest.