One of the side effects of my spine injury is that I have almost no feeling in my left foot. I say almost because I can feel the temperature change, but it’s a long-delayed. If you’re checking the water temperature in your bathtub and you stick your toe in, you know if it’s too warm or too cold quickly. It takes me 5 or 10 seconds before I would know if it’s too warm or too cold. The neurologists tell me it is a different set of nerves for temperature sensation than the other nerves are in your foot. I have broken toes in my left foot several times. I only know it happens after the toe turns black and blue. That should give you an idea about the lack of feeling in that foot
The mind plays tricks on us. If it doesn’t get signals from a part of our body that it knows it should, it will invent signals. The most common one is pain. It could also be the sensation like needing to scratch a missing limb in an amputee. My brain has decided that I need to feel pain in my left foot. Normally an aspirin or Tylenol might help for minor pain. For more serious pain, it might be an opiate of some form or another. None of those works with what is called peripheral neuropathy. Why? The pain doesn’t really exist. It is being created wholly in the mind of the sufferer. That’s why it is sometimes called phantom pain.
We have all sorts of things that affect our brains. They are currently trying is an antidepressant, amitriptyline, for my phantom pain. The tradenames for it are Vanatrip, Elavil, Endep. Like many of the chemicals used to treat the brain, it does not become effective with the first dose. In my case, they are going to try it for 30 days. I hope it works because the other drug commonly used for phantom pain is gabapentin. Gabapentin is an absolute no-no for me. It had unwanted side effects when I tried it. I will know if amitriptyline works by the end of February. Wish me luck!
