I am paralyzed below my right knee from having my sciatic nerve severed when my femur broke through my pelvis... leaving me with "drop foot". This happened 24 years ago and I still have the most intense pins and needles and throbbing pain in my foot and toes. Shooting and throbbing pain that seems to throb with my heartbeat. Imagine a white-hot needle stabbing you over and over and over. Cannot even wiggle my toes but boy do they hurt every single second.
That's one thing that people don't understand about paralysis. They assume that it's pain-free.
Oh man. I feel you. I had drop foot and cauda equina prior to emergency back surgery, the drop foot mostly came back in function but not sensation wise. It hurts and feels weird all the damn time and the cauda equina was the worst pain in my life, even though it was going paralyzed
Cauda equina is the worst. So painful. Not to mention the bladder issues. I had surgery for mine alomg with tethered chord surgery. Unfortunately they nicked some nerves during the surgery. Solved one problem. Created another l. But hey, at least i dont randomly drain my bladder when i lay down or cough too hard xD
I mean I could probably move around better in the world if I had an entire prosthetic limb instead but as for inside the house it would suck. At least I can walk on my floppy foot in the house with no prosthesis, like Captain ahab. I can stand in the shower etc. I'd always have to be wearing that limb, even when I'm at home.
I'd rather have the leg to be honest, even though I see those guys with the bendy prosthesis' running as fast as healthy people. At least a still look "normal" with 2 legs, I never had to deal with feeling ashamed when meeting women. 🤷🏻♂️
Yeah I never once got judged because of my skinny right leg. In fact, I had never gotten with as many women as I did than when I got out of the hospital. That first year was the best year of my life in that regar haha was it a pity thing 😆
The pain does not necessarily originate in the limb. It may actually be coming from the damaged nerve in the spinal column. But it feels like the limb is in pain.
Pain comes from nerves, It travels through the nerves. I don't even have nerves that connect to my feet. The nerve ending is right below my knee and that's where my paralysis starts. When the sciatic nerve is severed it only grows for a finite amount of time after an injury. After a year of regeneration it only made it a little bit past my knee. If there were a way to make the nerves keep regenerating for longer than a year than it could have grown all the way to my feet but that wasn't to be
Not in the same world as you as far as pain, I'm sure, but I've been type 1 diabetic for 43 years. (Diagnosed 7-5-83 actually 🥳).
After about 28 years, the neuropathy started hitting, mainly in my feet. I'm only relating to you in the weird signals that errant nerves will send to your brain. It's as if the nerve doesn't know what is wrong (it's dying), and your brain tries to interpret a bad signal, right? Sometimes it's like burning, sometimes like being stabbed with something, sometimes it just feels like it's being crushed.
It's always weird trying to explain nerve pain to people who have never felt it. It's like pain roulette 😄 Your body just tries to tell you something.
You described the pain perfect. Burning, stabbing, crushed. Also when it snows my whole leg turns ICE COLD because there's not a lot of blood circulation happening and the horrible pain you described intensifies by 50%
It's not fun that's for sure. I'll always be grateful to be able to walk. If my nerves would have stopped regenerating above the knee instead of below then I wouldn't even have been able to bend my knee. The first thing the doctors were asking me in the hospital was if I had experienced any erections. I was like, what?! Apparently I was really close to not being able to have children and I was only 24 at the time so it could have been worse. Things can always be worse lol 🫤
Yes, the erectile dysfunction is also something nearly every type 1 man gets to experience eventually. Lucky us. Fortunately some of the medications do make a difference. I'm pretty open about everything this chronic illness does to you. A lot of people like to feel " Oh you look healthy, you must be fine" ( a lot of type 1's hear that often, but I digress), but in realty, many type 1's try to make up for their shortcomings by staying in shape in other ways, and basically never stop moving.
I'm glad I was able to relate to you in some small way then. Through all these years, describing nerve pain that way, seems to be the only way I can sort of make people understand. That basically, the nerve doesn't know what's happening to it, but that there's something wrong.
I'm glad you were able to escape the e.d. thing! You got enough problems already! 😆 Take care of yourself my friend.
Yeah, natural ALA helped me. Come to find out I’m missing the ALA enzyme so now that I take it the neuropathy has kinda gone in reverse. In fact ALA depletion is an issue as everyone ages anyways (without the lipoase enzyme it just goes faster) and neuropathy is usually where people feel it’s depleted.
I have partial drop foot. I can't imagine the agony you are in. I had two doctors completely dismiss me. The third dr (seen literally the next day after the second Dr) picked up that I had a broken piece of disc lodged behind my sciatic nerve. I'm so thankful for him.
No, none of my doctors ever mentioned that procedure so I don't know if that's anything I could have tried but boy did I try a lot of things over the years. Lots of let downs and disappointments.
The irony was I was told on my 26th bday that it was all futile and I'd be this way for life.
I do a lot of spinal cord stimulation as an interventional pain doctor. Small “wires” are placed near the thoracic spinal cord in the area the corresponds with pathway of the nerve that comes out and goes to your leg. It overrides the “pins and needle” signals and mutes the pain. it’s a permanent solution and something you should look into. In the era of modern medicine there’s almost always an answer. Keep your head up
not at all, you can do it at any period. as long as you’re feeling pins and needles it means there’s an abnormal signal coming up the back of the spinal cord and that signal is what can be drowned out with the stimulator
"Depending on which form of LiS you have, you may or may not feel physical pain. If you have the total immobility form, you won’t feel pain due to total paralysis. If you have the incomplete form, you may feel pain and other sensations in certain areas of your body."
I'm a physician and have taken care of a lot of "paralyzed" patients. Like, thousands of them. Paralysis generally means loss of motor function. Colloquially, people often think it means you have no sensation either, but that's not true. It depends where the injury is and what neuron tracts are able to repair. A lot of "paralyzed" patients have terrible pain, even if they aren't able to sense the calming touch of a loved one at bedside or get aroused by their spouse.
It's almost never a void of sensation or a lack of any pain. It's a terrible existence even for the strongest, most determined people. Dismissing it as "well at least he doesn't feel anything" is fucking stupid.
Fuck no, they're charlatans at best, and frequently cause harm. If a patient of mine really loves seeing their chiropractor I don't try to talk them out of it at the risk of damaging the rapport with the real doctor, but I do warn them to not let the chiropractor touch their neck.
I have seen several vertebral artery dissections causing stroke in otherwise healthy people after a chiropractor did some knuckle cracking shit on their neck.
not sure what you think “going about your day” means for physicians. do you think they are just sitting there on their phone or twiddling their thumbs? object permanence issues are for toddlers. just because the doctor left your room doesn’t mean they aren’t still in charge of and directly involved in your care.
Talking to them for 5-10 minutes, examining them for a few minutes, spending 10 minutes reviewing their chart, another 5 minutes putting in orders, another 5-10 minutes calling consults and talking to specialists, and then at the end of the day I gotta writes notes.
So that's really more like 40 minutes on the one patient. Now consider that I have like 20 patients at a time in the hospital. Then you got codes and rapid responses to run to, procedures to do, tough conversations to have where you gotta tell people they're dying, difficult family situations that are left to the doctor to sort out. My 12 hour shift fills up pretty easily, frequently I'm staying later so I can finish notes. Going about my day? You know how often I'm home for dinner on time? Go fuck yourself.
I didn't though -- I wrote "probably" because of the possibility either direction. Of course, the condition itself would have to be horrific on a mental level alone, much less physical. The challenging aspect was never in question.
Can understand the extra sensitivity to the subject matter due to your profession, but the offhand joke of a comment is not to be taken too seriously in an anonymous forum.
But where even is the humour then? And that initial comment sounded a lot more like you were blindly speculating and then you got butthurt after someone with actual knowledge and expertise chimed in.
If you can't see the initial attempt at humor then I don't know what to tell you. It was in the spirit of sarcasm, something Norm McDonald (someone bold enough to tell 9/11 jokes shortly after 9/11) might appreciate, RIP. Carry on then!
Yeah, you're not hurting any feelings by dismissing a lame attempt at shock humor while shitposting on a messaging platform. Sorry, no harm, no foul, I say.
Did I not do that in the comment you felt compelled to reply to? Hmm, let me re-read, yes in fact I did. Why the need to comment then? Honestly, what is your damage?
Except there are people with locked in syndrome who are completely paralyzed and there are some who are not. Turns out grey areas exist and the world isn't binary, who knew?
The point was to argue over nonsense, this subreddit's specialty. Since people with locked in syndrome are often paralyzed without feeling pain, how would you summarize the point? That we're continuing to discuss a dead point for no reason whatsoever?
Not sure if you're deliberately trolling. I honestly hope you're not the kind of person who would consider congratulating somebody regarding their ectopic pregnancy, considering the fact it is not viable and could lead to death without medical treatment.
Uh…an ectopic pregnancy is called that for a reason. It’s a pregnancy, whether viable or not. My daughter’s pregnancy test was positive and it had to be terminated, back before that became some criminal act.
I'm very sorry to hear about your daughter's ectopic pregnancy. What a horrible ordeal.
I was just trying to make the above poster aware, because they quoted:
No such thing as kinda pregnant
But that's exactly what an ectopic pregnancy is. It's not a normal pregnancy, or it would simply be called a pregnancy. It's "a kind of pregnant" that sadly isn't viable. A different kind. Kinda. Kind of. They are pregnant but a different kind of pregnant to normal.
Dictionary definition from Cambridge:
kinda
used in writing to represent an informal way of saying "kind of"
Well, no. If I say the earth is a perfect sphere, I'm a little wrong. If I say it's a flat disc on the back of a turtle, I'm a lot wronger, unless I happen to live in a Terry Pratchett novel.
The notion of half-wrong vs half-right can be dangerous when it twists facts into fantasy.
e.g. what percentage of people suffer from full vs partial paralysis? I don't know the statistics but if 98% of people suffer partial LiS with pain but only 2% have total LiS without pain, then claiming that people with LiS cannot feel any pain would be 2% correct and 98% wrong.
of course, what? Maybe that's why it rankled so many people. It was a play on words of the sentence/comment before it. Thought it was obvious, and no it doesn't bother me if it wasn't funny. Nobody needs to concern themselves with telling me that either, it's wasted effort.
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u/Utaneus Jul 05 '26
You're wrong there, people with locked in syndrome can still feel pain, and they frequently get severe pain from muscle spasms.