--just comes from the hard-won expereince of having had a most unusual presentation (a full-body acute onset burning syndrome) that led me to do an enormous amount of research and compile a large database, much of which is available through links here and at some other boards (the Internet is a wonderful thing for those of us with weird health problems).

Yes, diabetes is the most common cause of neuropathy, such that if one has nerve symptoms, especially painful small fiber ones, most doctors are ready to attribute all of them to imparied glucose regulation. But it's certainly possible that you had a "smoldering" neuropathy for a long time due to diabetes that was greatly exacerbated by the infection--which would have put your immune system into overdrive, and there are plenty of immune mediated neuropathies--or even from the antibiotics (neuropathy is not an uncommon side effect from some of the more powerful ones, such as Flagyl).

There is a situation known as the "double crush phenomenon", which basically means that one may have something assaulting the nerves that causes no or minimal symptoms, but if another neurotoxic situation is added, one may trip over into major symptoms--the two assaults are just too much for the nerves. This often happens, for example, when diabetics get additonal compressive forces on nerves and develop carpal tunnel (or tarsal tunnel), or, as in my case, already damaged nerves became more prone to spinal arthritis radiculopathy (inflammation of nerve roots near the spine).

See:

http://www.emedicine.com/orthoped/by...l-syndrome.htm

http://www.emedicine.com/pmr/topic21.htm

http://www.chiroweb.com/archives/14/09/04.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/en...indexed=google