Zdenko’s Story

 I believe I have symptomatic Tarlov cysts, because I have fluctuating sacral and perineal dull pain, worsening with longer walking, standing, banding and sometime burning sensation on the back of my legs and on my soles. I also have a history of acute low back pain too, which may be connected with (or completely caused by) the cysts.

I work as a painter/handyman, and when I have to do a lot of kneeling/bending, then I get something what looks like a L5/S1 disk bulge – acute stabbing nerve pain in my low back, like a pinched local nerve and sometimes I’m disabled for a week or two (once I could not walk at all for a week). These episodes have been becoming more frequent over the last 2.5 years. During the recoveries from that, on some weeks I had pain in perineum, but then it went away. I always thought that I had a disk bulge, but on the MRI (done 3 moths after the last episode, in May 2026), the disks look good – confirmed in a short zoom call with Dr Feigenbaum. He thinks that all my symptoms including the acute low back pain have been caused by the Tarlov cysts. That left me a bit confused, because I thought that only the perineal and sacral pain was caused by the cysts. The L5/S1 disk is extremely close to the cysts, so there is another possibility that the nerve roots could get chemically irritated from an injured disc and the nerves could stay sensitive for 6 moths or longer, but again, the disk looks good and I’ve been having the perineal and sacral pain for last 5 moths now, without any gradual improvement (it fluctuates though). I do everything without bending my low back. Bending  is still painful. 

Currently I can work 4-8 hrs a day, without bending.