I will share my journey with sciatica, highlighting the risks of labels and the importance of understanding. I have lived with sciatica since 2008, and fully expect to live with it for the rest of my life.  For years I struggled with the intense pain I was experiencing, and the disability that was associated with my condition. I was drugged-up on a variety of medications, none of which were helping enough, and I just didn’t know what to do.  Nor, it seems, did my clinicians.   People told me about their sciatica, but mine felt very different. I didn’t understand why I was getting intense, shocking-like, unpredictable pain, with numbness and other strange sensations when they didn’t, or what to do about it.  Dr Google didn’t help me understand, nor did my clinicians.  My medical care, dictated by UK NICE guidelines, was not effective enough for me.  It was ‘typical’ sciatica care, but I was not ‘typical’.  I struggled each day and yearned for help.  Four years into my sciatic journey my life changed, and I became much better able to self-manage and live well with pain.  What was it that so dramatically changed the trajectory of my sciatic journey?