Glen,
I was just reading some of your posts last night. Mind if I ask you some questions?
How did your SFN start? How long until you healed up, or at least most of the way? I’m really curious about your journey as you were healing - what symptoms did you have? New ones come and go constantly? Flare ups?
I’m really confused by all of this. I have a lot of symptoms that are alaresdy a lot better, but then I get new ones that come and go, or flare ups that last a day or 2, or even a week and then go away.
At the peak of this I had very strange numbing in my hands, textures felt aweful, vibrations felt like they continued to vibrate even when I wasn’t touching, say my phone or toothbrush, anymore. Hands were sweating a lot at random times. Vision would almost black out upon standing up, etc. Had twitches all over my body as well.
With that said, numbing has gone away, the vision black out upon standing is pretty much gone but do get a little lightheaded upon standing for maybe 5 seconds. Hand sweating seems a lot more normal, twitching is way way better as well. I would assume it’s safe to say that if I feel this peaked around October of last year, can use this as a starting point of healing? If so, it hasn’t even been a year yet, with this much improvement.. is that a good sign?
Sorry for the wall of text, I have only seen a few speak of healing from experience. I’m trying to remain optimistic and listen my doctor, who is an SFN specialist, but it becomes difficult to tell which direction this is headed with the symptoms coming and going.
I was getting a lot of zinger type feelings, even tickles, some slight itchiness and such as well. I kept hoping this was a sign of healing but who really knows.
Quote:
Originally Posted by glenntaj
--particularly those that come from autoimmune triggers or toxicities (and what you described might well have elements of both), do have a tendency to result in slow, partial recovery once the offending cause is removed, but because nerves tend to heal slowly, and often in different pathways than their original ones due to the need to grown around, through, and past other tissues, the healing regimen often produces all sorts of weird symptoms in itself, which can feel very much like the original symptoms of nerve damage (parastheses, intermittent numbness, nerve pain, etc.). The brain has a lot of trouble figuring out exactly how to interepret the odd signals coming from damaged/repairing nerves, although eventually it tends to settle somewhat.
But this is why many of us keeps symptom diaries, as it is often hard to tell whether one is getting better or worse except in long term retrospect.
Also, recovery may not be complete. In many cases, it's patchy. And, the new nerve configurations often leave one more prone to compressive effects than someone who had not gone through this; it's easier to compress nerves lying near or in other tissue than it might have been before. So one tends to be prone to "weirdities" for the rest of one's life. (I never had trouble with my pudendal nerve area, for example, until after my acute onset body-wide small fiber syndrome in April 2003. I experienced considerable recovery over years, but I still have lots of things that crop up from time to time suddenly, make me uncomfortable for a while, and then slowly disappear.)
|