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First...I am not a physician. I was an MRI technologist for 10 years and did/saw thousands of these.
As an example---The attached images are two MRI images of the area you are asking about.
The star is the herniated disc. That is what has decreased in volume for you. That's good, but a herniated disc can look several different ways on a MRI, yours probably did not look exactly like this one. Also, a "resolved extruded fragment" is good too.
The green arrow corresponds to the right edge of the thecal sac, the nerve root exits the spinal canal on the right,just to the right of this. the same area on the left is where the left nerve root exits. The thecal sac is the area on the left image that looks like a boomerrang just below the red star. It should be oval, or kinda tri-oval, not boomerrang shaped. this person has a herniated disk as well. Some herniated disks can reduce in size without intervention. Sounds like yours has to some degree. Did the pain get better recently?
The image on the left is taken as if you were sliced in to top and bottom halves at the level of the L5 disk (angled to the angle of the disk space. The dark circle is the disk space between the L4 and L5 vertebral bodies.The image on the right is as if you were sliced in to equal right and left halves going through the spinal column. The square block looking things are the vertebrae, the dark stripe from top to bottom is the spinal canal. In between the blocks are the disks.
Hope this helped
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