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Member
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 191
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Member
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 191
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On several occasions, in the early years of "all my weird symptoms," I would have an odd sensation that my legs were tree trunks.
They were not numb, paralyzed, or stiff. But I would be standing (like in the shower or elsewhere) and have this feeling that my legs were not my legs--they were just somehow like tree trunks, somehow VERY DIFFERENT from how my legs normally felt. I wasn't imagining it.
I believe this was a disturbance in the "body map" which we have in our brains. Think about people with phantom limb pain--pain in a body part that has been amputated or paralyzed.
The brain can get wrong signals about how a limb does or doesn't belong to the body. The neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote very interestingly about the "scotoma" he experienced with regard to a leg that he'd injured, where the nerve connection was damaged.
Read his book "A Leg to Stand On." It is a very moving description of what we limbolanders experience with respect to not having doctors listen to or understand us. (Sacks's own surgeon brushed off his description of the "missing leg.")
Nancy T.
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