--almost to the minute; the start was that acute.

I was in the shower in the early afternoon of April 12, 2003, and began noticing a strange tingly/numbness between the fourth and fifth toe on my right foot. Within hours, it had spread all over the foot as a searing, burning pain. In three days, I noticed it in my hands; by day ten, when I was going in to see my first neurologist, it was all over my body, head to toe, with the exception of a small area around my larynx (which has never been affected--no idea why, but at least I can use it as a "normal" baseline). The progression was so fast I could actually feel it at times going up my side, climbing my face, going across my lips--incredible sensations such as I had never experienced anything like before.

Much of the rest of my story is well-known here--the extensive in and out-of-hospital testing, all of which was negative/normal; the parade of neuros in Staten Island who were stumped; my taking Neurontin, which did work to moderate the symptoms enough for me to start doing research (at the onset I couldn't eat, sleep, tolerate clothes or bedsheets), my beginning to drive my own further testing protocol and my visit to Cornell-Weill, where skin biopsy finally showed I had an extensive small-fiber neuropathy, and the slow and painful process to recover at least some fiber density and function, and to lessen symptoms (it appears that I was the vicitim of a post-infectious molecular mimicry autoimmune process, but there's never been any "direct' evidence of that; it's been likened to a small-fiber sensory Guillain-Barre, but at least it appears to have been monophasic).