My experience with medical issues in the past few years has been, “If you think things are bad, they can only get worse.” I know some problems have gotten better because of surgery, but my peripheral neuropathy has deteriorated in the past year.
While on dialysis, there were many times when I thought the numbness and pain was getting worse. Looking back, the neuropathy now appears rather stable. I would get attacks every few weeks, and the intensity did not fluctuate that much. Even the everyday numbness seemed constant. After transplant surgery, my blood sugar has been difficult to control, which likely increased the overall level of neuropathy. Most nights, one or both feet would be so numb that I could barely move them.
More alarmingly, the frequency of pain attacks has definitely increased. Another attack just started about 15 minutes ago, and it is the fourth or fifth one in the past seven days. Each time it happens, I basically lose a night of sleep due to the constant pain. The intensity has increased too. Right now, each pain attack would leave my entire lower leg numb for about ten seconds, and this repeats every 30 to 45 seconds. The only remedy is to stay awake until you are so tired that you collapse from fatigue, and hopefully the attacks end when you wake up. Sometimes the pain would just start up again for several hours.
What really drives me crazy is there does not appear to be any immediate drivers to each attack. Sure, the long-term cause is chronic diabetes. The excess sugar in the bloodstream causes nerve damage, and the pain is from dead or injured nerve endings. However, the attacks are totally random. This time, I was tired after dinner, so I took a short nap. I was able to fall asleep, but the sudden foot pain woke me up after about an hour. Sometimes, I would be just sitting, either reading a book or browsing the web and the pain would suddenly appear. Frustrating.
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I may as well connect to the office and do some work since I am unable to sleep from the pain. There is a large meeting tomorrow today (12:39 am) and I need to provide many slides. I sent out three emails over the past week reminding my team of the deadlines, but only about 1/3 of the analysts responded. It is an inconvenient situation as I outrank everyone, both in title and seniority, but none of them actually report to me. It is going to look stupid for everyone if our slides are only half complete for the meeting tomorrow…
Life with chronic diseases 