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I'm sorry for your situation.
How are you doing now (since you posted that some weeks ago.)

I'm a guy my friends rely on. Especially when something heavy goes down and they want someone level headed who remains calm in drama. But I'm also fortunate enough to have a couple of people I know I can rely on 100%. Something that has proven itself over the past 35+ years. I'm grateful for that anyway.

Well, since then, the nerve pain has gone away, the lawyer finally stopped blocking the totaling of my car, meaning I was able to get a new car.

Unfortunately, the rest of the listed problems still apply, plus the water over nine counties in my state ( including where I am ) was poisoned by a chemical company who had a tank failure, a redundancy failure, and was positioned right next to the drinking water source for those nine counties, meaning that the water had to be shut off and couldn't be used for anything but flushing toilets and putting out fires. Well, after a few days of that, they declared the water safe again, and have started turning people's water back on, but even after flushing the system, the water still smells like anise ( which is what the chemical smells like ), and is still a severe skin and eye irritant, but they are assuring us it's safe to drink, even if it'll burn any skin it comes in contact with.

My lawyer is still playing the waiting game, so much so that the other guy's insurance has stopped hounding me to make him talk to them, and just yesterday as I was walking to my car, I had a sudden back pain and my legs went numb and would no longer support my weight. The first doctor I saw said I needed an MRI, so he sent me by ambulance to a hospital that could do that, where I waited for five hours and 50 minutes in the waiting room before I was taken back into the ER, where the doctor told me I was faking it, and tried to prescribe me three separate kinds of opiates and shuffle me out the door, all while my legs still didn't work.

Over the next six hours, I slowly regained the ability to walk ( still not that well ), cursed out the pill-pushing bimbo until she cried ( later on, I felt momentarily bad for that, but later came to my senses ), saw a real doctor who ordered an MRI and finally got me a wrist band ( so I could be treated, which the last doctor had neglected in her attempts to write me month-long prescriptions of three narcotic drugs and get me out of her ER ), got my MRI which indicated a pinched nerve was causing the problem, got started on some Prednisone to free up said pinched nerve, then eventually got home at 0430. 10 hours later, I got a call from the ER saying that they reviewed my MRI and found that it wasn't a pinched nerve after all, it was a severely herniated disc, and they had already referred my case to a neurosurgeon.

Come this time next year, I've been told, I stand better than even odds of being in a wheelchair full-time.

Total time elapsed between first symptom and confirmation that I'm soon approaching obsolescence: 23 and a half hours.

The best part, though, was the doctor who told me that I'd better start preparing my wife for the major life change that comes with being married to a cripple ( Doc phrased it a little more politely than that ), then when I told her I was unmarried, we went through the list of all the other family I didn't have to help me out, before she recommended I buy a .38 and then started talking about the only humane thing to do when a horse can't walk no more.

So, it's had it's ups and downs. Mostly downs, but, y'know, them's the breaks, yeah? I'd say I had a mostly decent run. I mean, 29 years is more than some get, and I've wracked up all manner of interesting experiences, even if I did have to spend the last five of 'em completely alone except for the moments I was being used for either my car or one of the many skills I picked up along the way.

Um... YUCK?
I'm not making fun but that's some pretty heavy s**t and I'm not sure what to say other than sorry you are in that position. Which sounds rather shallow since I'm sure you are a lot sorrier than me.

Though seems like they could operate on the disc with some chance of success. I have a friend who had two of her disks operated on. Her legs didn't stop working but she was in pretty bad pain and was told if she didn't get the operation the situation was going to get a lot worse.

I hope you are able to get a good settlement out of the other driver's insurance company to at least take the burden off paying for the medical care and whatever else you need.