Painfully Numb: Healing Takes Feeling

For a long time, it felt as if I'd never recover.  My health took an abrupt turn after medical treatments left me with a strange and painful collection of symptoms. The most prominent was a persistently twisted head which caused continuous pain in my jaw and neck. When I first went to the emergency room, CT scans reportedly showed nothing abnormal, though the doctor noted my right jaw was "fuller."

It all began with earlier intramuscular steroid injections (kenalog) in my upper back and right scapula area.  Following that treatment, my muscles became almost suddenly rigid and I developed increasing pain including a highly inflamed trigger point in my right shoulder, new sciatica pain, and pain around an old surgical scar.  Though much of the pain disappeared after receiving an "anti-inflammatory" at the ER, the immense grogginess made it almost uneventful. At first, what I assumed was temporary fatigue seemed like a reasonable trade-off.

What I later realized, however, was that each dose of the anti-inflammatory appeared to be followed by a new wave of weakness. Approximately two nights after the first dose, I awoke to a racing heart and sudden weakness in my neck which was dismissed as anxiety. After the second dose, weakness spread to my lower legs, ankles, and feet. At the time, I had little to connect these events. It was only after reviewing my medical records a year later that the pattern became obvious that I had been given Toradol each time.  I had traded pain for numbness and weakness.

For more than a very long year, my health remained largely unchanged. I lost a third of my body weight which included drastic muscle loss, struggled with ongoing dehydration, profound fatigue, and felt as though my body's "inflammatory" healing mechanisms had been completely shut down. Then one day, I stepped on the scale and noticed I had gained a few pounds for the first time since my decline began. It was only two or three pounds, but to me it was monumental. For over a year my weight had steadily fallen to its new low.  Suddenly, it was moving in the opposite direction.  That small change became the first sign that recovery had begun.

Over the following months, I continued gaining weight. Other unexpected signs of healing followed: goosebumps returned, sweating normalized, hair growth and gut motility resumed. I also experienced the feeling or urge to stretch which I later learned was pandiculation. These changes left me wondering what had shifted. Had my digestive system simply healed? Had some underlying mechanism turned back on?  Did one allow the other to recover?  No one seemed able to answer those questions, yet I knew the short answer was "yes."  So I dove into learning about gut health, and during that process learned about Phase Angles derived from BIA testing which makes a direct connection between nutrition and muscle health.

As sensation slowly returned to my body, healing returned with it.  Simply put, I knew I was finally recovering, yet it would take many more months before I would piece together the details. In hindsight, and perhaps even during the acute injury, I knew that when my capacity to feel turned off, so did my ability to heal.  I was relieved that for the first time in over a very long year, I had hope that recovery was possible.

During my healing process I came across a story quite similar to mine that provided some objective insight; everything from the anti-inflammatories to subsequent weakness and impaired mobility.  She made the same comment as me many times in my head saying "How did this happen?"  She had done extensive testing with no clear answers, but noted a very long list of vitamin deficiencies.  Based on that, it seemed apparent to me there was quite possibly a gastrointestinal issue though she made no mention of that. Since then I've wondered how many people have suffered sometimes insidious side effects that may have slowly impacted their health.  The key role muscle plays in longevity is one reason I think BIA testing can serve as useful indicator to proactively monitor changes.