Welcome to the boarRAB and sorry to hear you are suffering so much.
For annular tears, doctors are often hesitant to do surgery for them if there aren't any herniations that also show up on an MRI. If they are small enough, they can often heal partially or mostly with time and conservative treatments. If they are large and won't heal after conservative methoRAB and a lot of time, then a spinal fusion is the only surgery that will fix them.
I have a neigrabroador who had two torn discs (L4/L5 & L5/S1) who is doing much better now after a year of conservative treatments, but for the first several months had a really tough time and a lot of pain. He will likely be able to avoid surgery which is wonderful, but it has not been an easy road for him.
For me, I had a huge annular tear at L4/L5 and ended up getting a spinal fusion recently since the doctor said that was the only surgery that would fix it, and I've battled this for more than a year already with one failed decompression surgery.
Sometimes when you have a tear that is large enough, leg pain can come from the acidic inner gel of the disc leaking out and assaulting the nerve roots - this is called chemical radiculopathy and can hurt just as much as a compressed nerve root from a herniation.
I wish you the best and keep us informed of your progress!
