I’m so sorry your son is in agony. I would never try to diagnose anyone (let alone over the internet) but your son’s symptoms have some similarities to my experience with foraminal stenosis. I completely understand the suicidal ideation that comes with chronic, debilitating pain. Again, I’m so sorry your child is going through this!

I had bone growth which crushed a lumbar nerve root completely flat a few years ago. This was both agonizing and incapacitating. Because of its location, it couldn’t be imaged on an x-ray, regular CT scan or MRI. My EMG was inconclusive. Physical therapy made it much worse. After much foot-dragging, my insurance provider allowed me to get a CT mylogram. This is a CT scan right after a spinal tap (I know) where imaging dye is injected. While this test didn’t show the foraminal stenosis either (we still had no image of what caused my pain) it DID reveal that there was something severely interrupting my nerve path that needed to be quickly addressed.

The neurosurgeon figured it was a bulging disc we just couldn’t see that was impinging on a nerve. He scheduled surgery almost immediately. It wasn’t until the surgery that he found the bone growth inside the foraminal passageway. By this point my L3 nerve root was “crushed flat like a ribbon.”

For me, this damage was permanent (thanks, slow indifferent insurance company!). Surgery didn’t provide quick relief: it took months of physical therapy before I returned to normal life (walking, working, etc.) I still have numbness in one leg and if that nerve root gets irritated I can end up in a lot of pain. So I’m careful. But I am ok.

I’m going to write out what helped in an additional comment because I’m on my phone and this app tends to make me lose comments before I can post them.