Symptoms at odd times
 

It's a 99% guarantee that when I wake up and step out of bed that my feet will have mild pins and needles and feel scruffy for the first few minutes of walking around. After that it seems to disappear for the rest of the day. I will have occasional spasms and pains, but not the pins and needles. When I wake up I feel absolutely nothing, but as soon as my feet touch the floor there it is?

When I drive for long periods of time in the morning it seems to give me pins and needles in my feet, but not as bad of the afternoon on the way home?

I took a nap this evening and woke up and my left foot was filled with pins and needles! My ankle felt as if it had been stuffed with something that wouldn't allow it to bend. After minutes of stretching and massaging, I am back to normal like nothing had ever happened? Could this be something different from neuropathy? I'm beginning to wonder f it's an issue with my spinal cord or something along that lines.

Fortunately I haven't had the awful burning in my left foot in months, it sems to be shifted more toward twitches, spasms, fatigue, sometimes a weak feeling in my left leg, and the morning pins and needles.

You may have a compressive issue in your back. I know my feet can hurt lying down on my back. On my sides or stomach much less so.

I do get the stiff ankle, but it is visibly swollen when that happens.
I felt it ping/stab climbing the outside cement steps 2 Sundays ago, and now it is flaring again.

Do you use any pain relievers? NSAIDs for example? If so take them regularly for 3 or 4 days, especially at bedtime. Aleve has a long duration, and may help with morning symptoms. If the NSAIDs work, then that points to an inflammatory process like arthritis, spurs, etc and maybe in your lower back.

Numbness and pins and needles in the morning may reflect low blood sugars. A heavy carb meal the night before could push you low when waking up. Once you eat you secrete cortisol after breakfast which is an anti-inflammatory like NSAIDs only stronger. So if the symptoms change during the day, keep a journal with times/duration of the symptoms and match it up to activities, food intake, and even the types of shoes you wear.
Cortisol falls around 4pm, and if you start to feel the symptoms again, then that means there is inflammatory stuff going on.

You may have paresthesias and not real PN damage. They feel similar but have different outcomes. Paresthesias will go away when you identify their triggers and remove them, but the PN would need to actually heal up instead, if it even does and that takes a long time usually.

I have noticed when I wear my lace up steel toed boots the pins and needles on the ball of my foot is worse. Last week I had a weird numbish shooting sensation on the very low part of my lower back. In the past I have had a bad habit of popping my back, neck, and knees, so I don't know if that could have either caused or worsened another condition.

The other day waiting in a checkout line for an extended period I had on thin flat slip on shoes and I could feel shooting sensations going from the ball of my feet upward through my ankle.

As far as the food before bed goes. My family doesn't know what "healthy eating" is. They cook anything and everything out of boxes and just quick threw together stuff. My finals are next week so I don't have a lot of free time at the moment, but as soon as they're over I'm going to do mass amounts of research about healthy eating, and start implementing a healthy diet.

Some people are prone to compressions on the top of the foot.
If you lace up shoes too tightly, they will constrict the nerves that come down on the top of the foot and damage them.

I now use the alternate lacings recommended here:
http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/lacingmethods.htm
Normally I link to NorthCoast footcare, but Google is putting up some warning when I try to go there today. Their lacing suggestions for compression of the top of the foot, involves skipping holes (only using every other one). I then use elastic laces to take further pressure off.

I'd think about different shoes also.. do you HAVE to wear those boots?

A visit to a good podiatrist and some xrays, and exam for mechanical issues in the foot may help you.
I can only wear lacing shoes with very soft padded tongues, and the alternate lacing style...loosely... or my toes go numb.

Pain in the ball of the foot can indicate damaged sesamoid bones.
When damaged they move and inflame the tendons there, causing a painful tendonitis.

I have the sensations that you describe in the morning, but mine are in my hands and arms. Pins and needles and weakness. I cannot knit, crochet, or do any kind of needlework for the first three hours or so that I am awake. Typing is hard and I make lots of mistakes. I am fine by 11 or noon, but before that I am very awkward and I do get the pins and needles if I try to use my hands, like typing this.
When I first wake up I even have trouble opening my medicine bottles, my hands feel like clumsy, weak paws.
No suggestions, just commiseration.

Susanne-

I have the same problems in the morning with my hands-thought it was just me! I don't know how many glasses I have dropped in the morning-

Jake-getting out of bed is the worst time for my feet. Don't really have an explanation for it and I "shuffle" around for about 10 min to start. Have had this going on for over 10 years.


Judie

My symptoms haven't hardly been going on for a year yet, and it is still hard for me to wrap my head around all this stuff. My hands only have weird sensatiions when I'm laying on my side and my ring and pinky finger fall "asleep" very easily.

My feet is almost EVERY single morning for just a few minutes and then it goes away.

Have either of you had a true diagnosis of anything? What are your other symptoms?

My diagnosis is of hereditary neuropathy CMT type 2. My family history was incomplete, but I do have a half sister who wore leg braces as a child. It is a muscular dystrophy classed disease, but it is actually a muscular atrophy. As the nerves die the muscles do too, starting from the toes and fingers upwards. Mine has reached past my knees as far as numbness, with weakness in my arms and legs. I am unable to move my toes or the front of my feet at all.
This is untreatable and progressive.
My 28 year old son has it, and his symptoms are worse than mine were at hs age. It varies a lot even within families.
I have a complete loss of sensation in my legs, reduced sensitivity in my fingers, weakness (I walk with a hiking pole, two if outdoors) and constant pain in my legs and arms. It feels like it is coming fom the bones but neuropathic pain is tricky and hard to define. I am on time release morphine and Percocet as needed for breakthrough pain. Neither is a large dose and I am far fom pain-free but I am able to function, rather than lying on the sofa all day feeling sorry for myself, which is all I would manage to do.

Have you ever pursued Hereditary Neuropathy with Liability to Pressure Palsies (HNPP)? Here is a site explaining it very well.

http://www.hnpp.org/

It is the opposite of CMT1A. CMT1A has a duplication and HNPP has a deletion. The site explains it all very well.

CMT is under the "umbrella" as they say of the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) along with 40 other neurological diseases. There are many, many types of it and symptoms vary greatly even within the same family.

Does anyone in your family have anything at all that might be similar to what you are experiencing?

Kitt
Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT)

After questioning some family members I found a couple things out, but I don't know if it's useful. My grandmother and great grandmother both had some type of surgery on some veins in their legs, I'm not sure what the procedure was called--this is all my mom knew about it. Anxiety runs in both sides of my family so I know this can at least be contributing to whatever is causing me problems.

My grandma and mom both have psoriasis which is an autoimmune disease.

My aunt has fibromyalgia.

My grandma has had shingles, which from my understanding is related to the chicken pox virus(which I had 2 times when I was young). I'm probably digging deeper into all this that necessary, but I just don't want to overlook something that could be resolved. I've been contemplating on going somewhere like the MayoClinic. Does anyone have any advice?