Hi,

This may be slightly off-topic, but hope that someone here might provide some feedback.

I was diagnosed with spinal stenosis at L4 awhile ago, and had a minimally-invasive laminectomy in 2010. Before the surgery, both my legs would go numb and hurt to the point that I almost couldn't feel them, and I got immediate relief from that surgery. However, during recovery from that surgery, when I lay down (esp. on one specific couch that we have), I could occasionally feel a kind of "tugging" in my left lower back, a couple of inches above the hip area.

I had some remaining problems with numbness/tightness in my legs below the knees and in the feet/ankles (I have a thread about this in the peripheral neuropathy forum here), and some pain in a specific area in my left buttock, so the same neurosurgeon did an "L4 re-exploration" earlier this year (April).

Since then, I'm occasionally feeling some "aching" in the same area of my left lower back. It's not sharp pain, but more like an ache, in a very small area. The original neurosurgeon said that looking at both my lumbar MRIs and the pelvic MRI, he doesn't think that this ache/pain is from the spine.

Anyway, almost all of the MRIs that I've had, including a pelvic MRI earlier this year, showed a large (about 3 in. x 3 in.) renal cyst on my left kidney, so recently with that back pain in my left lower back, I went to see a urologist, and I asked him if it was possible that the cyst could be causing the left lower back pain. He said it was unlikely, but that I could see an interventional radiologist about a possible aspiration, where they drain the cyst.

I've been researching that, and understand that getting an aspiration done, even if it provided relief, the cyst could re-fill after some indefinite time, but that the aspiration would be diagnostic, i.e., tell me if the cyst was causing the back pain.

The reason for this post is that I've been googling around, and I've found some, but very little, and oftentimes, vague, information about whether such renal cysts can cause back pain, so I was wondering if anyone here has had any experience with having back pain from a renal cyst, and also had an aspiration and what the results were?

Thanks,
Jim