It took me quite a while to acknowledge the discomfort I had been feeling lately in my left leg: During several weeks I had become increasingly aware that my thighs and calves hurt just a bit more than usual during my morning runs. I was certain that this growing discomfort was caused by my sciatic nerve.
In the fuzzy way that things look at the periphery of our awareness, I pictured my sciatic nerve somehow romantically as long, sinuous, and vulnerable, and now irritated because it was impinged upon near its spinal passage. Just the way a psychiatrist, with only vague reminiscences of anatomy, might imagine how a nerve looks: thin, long, and annoying.