I'm sorry to hear the pain your having, I can't believe that your doctor just prescribed painkillers.
Mine strongly urged me to have physical therapy. Costly yes, but I did learn a lot of exercises to help my back out.
I thought maybe I still had my papers with them on it, but of course I can't find them
But I did find this website which looks to have the ones I had done. There is a lot of exercises, I was doing about 20 min of exercise 3x's/day but it honestly helped.
Hope you can get some relief.
{{{HUGS}}}
Anna