--confuse, and anger, the crap out of everybody.

That's because my original neuropathic syndrome seems to have been monophasic, and I have had good recovery--but I have undoubtedly been left with a certain degree of permanent damage, which flares up intermittently and makes me less functional, as well as increased tendencies to damage my nerves anew, even if that damage is generally temporary. My body-wide acute onset burning neuropathy symptoms are much reduced, but I still have symptoms from time to time; I also have a right side C6/C7 radiculopathy that produces tingling numbness symptoms that are very different from my original burning ones and seems to be here to stay, and I am very prone to a whole host of compression effects from my damaged areas--I get ulnar symptoms if I lean on the elbow too long, carpal and tarsal tunnel problems intermittently, an on-again/off-again right thigh meralgia parasthetica . . .

I can normally manage or block out these symptoms well, and therefore give the impression of being pretty much "normal", and pretty energetic. But there are times, especially if several things are going on at once, that I just have to withdraw and hang around the couch/bed for a while. This is very confusing to people, as I may have been engaged in normal activities hours before. And it's hard for people to understand as there is no obvious physical thing they can see that has driven me away. Even my son pouts if I cannot work with him on his basketball or baseball. To him, and I suppose to many others, it looks like I'm moody and withdrawing arbitrarily, even though I try to assure him/them I'm not.

I don't remember quite where I read this, but I remember reading somewhere about the anlaogy of the spoon supply as applied to those with chronic conditions. In essence, those of us with chonic conditions wake up each day with a supply of spoons. The number of available spoons vary from day to day. For each activity we do, we have to sacrifice a certain fraction of our spoon supply, and obviously some activities cost more than others. Some days we may wake up with a lot of spoons--enough to do anything we want to that day without running out. More often, we wake up with fewer, and we realize we have to parse them out carefully during the day to make it through the essential activities of that day. Sometimes a certain activity that normally takes only a few spoons takes a whole batch of them, and then we're tapped, and have to retreat. And some days we wake up with few or no spoons and really just have to weather the day as best we can.

I've used this analogy with many people--for some it helps see the dilemma; for others, well, nothing seems to help them see.

It's one of the reasons we need these boards--here, people are well familiar with the variations we go through, and with days when there seem to be no spoons, and only knives in our feet, our backs, our fingers . . .