Nerve Problems

I used to have really, really ticklish feet.  My husband has perhaps never been so delighted as the day my endocrinologist told him that yes, tickling was a good way to check sensation in my feet, as long as while he was tickling them he also checked for sores.  (This is a reality of life with diabetes - you may not realize when your feet begin to get numb and sores go unhealed unless you check often.)  For a while, the damage in my spine caused my feet to stop being ticklish, because I could barely tell they were being touched at all.  What a tragedy for my dear husband!

But with much of my nerve damage recovering over the past year, I once again have ticklish feet.  (Hooray, he says!)  This doesn't mean that everything is hunky dory, though.  There are still some interesting misfires in my nervous system.  For example:

When my feet are massaged with lotion, the stimulation causes muscle spasms in my face, especially in the area of my forehead right above my eyebrows and around my eye sockets including upper cheeks.

While sitting in a partially reclined but mostly upright position, with my right hand relaxed at my side and propped up on a pillow, I will often experience unbearable nerve pain or itchiness or both radiating from deep inside my right breast and culminating with terrible aching in my right nipple.  This feels something like how I imagine wearing a nipple clamp might feel.  (No, I don't actually know.  Yet.  Maybe.  Probably not ever.)

While sitting upright with good straight posture, I experience itchiness in the parts of  my back that are covered in scar tissue from the spine surgeries and there is no relieving it with scratching, because this skin, while apparently capable of sending false itch signals to my brain, is not capable of perceiving touch i.e. scratching.  In fact it might be that the scar tissue is not sending the itch signals at all, it may be that nearby nerves are sending pain or pressure signals to my brain that are being incorrectly translated and categorized as itchiness in my scar area.  It's so maddening it can make me cry, and generally the only cure is laying down to relieve the downward compressing pressure within my spine.

My feet, especially my toes, and sometimes my lower calves, continue to be hypersensitive to touch.  Sometimes I can stand for them to be gently massaged or lightly touched.  Other times the lightest bump from the hand of someone walking past the foot of my bed is excruciating, like dropping a hammer on my bare toes.  

Not exactly as much fun as a barrel of monkeys, but at least these nerve problems don't throw poop and banana peels.  I mean, at the end of the day, having nerve problems at least means that I have nerves which feel something, and I'll take that any day.