[Wide-O]

Hey folks! Those who follow the thread in the alcohol section know that I have been sober for 780 days now, so I thought it was a good time to update on my PN status.

Most of the previous year had gone by on a pink cloud until about December, when there was more worrying, stress, and yes... more pain.

Incidentally, one thing I learned last year is that anorexia is a real thing - as I have experienced the beginning of it myself. Even though my weight had gone down from 128 to 91kg - and I started to look pretty skinny - I still *felt* like a fat person. Sure, I could somehow see in the mirror I wasn't, but it was like I almost didn't believe what I saw, and kept thinking "I need to lose weight." Pretty weird. My wife also started to comment that it was over the top, so now I've gone up a bit to 98kg (6'7")

Anyway, since then my PN has gone up and down in such a way that it would have been impossible to answer "did it get better?". Some days I would have said "sure, it's gone!", other days I was feeling like it was getting worse again. But overall - and this is only in hindsight - it did continue to improve, but just not in a straight line. Some weeks there were a lot of cramps (like really painful ones), some weeks I almost forgot I had PN.

However, a week ago I hurt my back by misstepping of the stairs. I thought I was at the last tred, I wasn't, and you can guess the rest. It compressed my spine (L4-L5) and after a few hours both my legs were "sleeping" again. I instantly remembered the feeling: that's how my PN got started back in 2010.

Although not as bad as then, back were the sensations like someone was pulling my big toes with pliers, some light burning, feeling heavy as a brick... so I guess I wasn't imagining that the two were connected after all: alcohol abuse had weakened my nerve endings, and the back problem was the "trigger" that set the other pains in motion in 2010.

However, this time the symptoms are much less (phew...*), and after 20 minutes on a torsion device (in which you kinda hang upside down by your ankles, gently decompressing your spine), the next morning, the "sleeping" feeling was mostly gone, as was most of the returned PN pain. I'll have to do a few more sessions, and hopefully I'll be back on the path of PN recovery - although at this point I doubt that there is such a thing as full recovery from PN: it will always be a vulnerable area.

*needless to say I literally got nauseous thinking the full blown thing was back... which causes stress... which caused more pain... and then I snapped out of that, which helped a lot.