The nerve! Turns out your really can grow some
First 90 days of NeuroGen Medical treatments make a huge difference
Yep, I fell asleep in the chair with my feet in “the bucket” again tonight. They are pruned, pale, and cold, but I’m pretty danged happy with them.
I’m just gettin’ real tired of being tied to this danged bucket for an hour every day.
The first 90 days of treatments with Dr. William Lewis and the fine folks at NeuroGen Medical shows that nerves can grow back. I’m sold, I’m convinced, I can see it no other way. Dying nerves can recover. Whodathunkit.
A quick recap: After years of increasing numbness in my feet and doctors telling me there was nothing I could do about it, I went to Dr. Lewis for a screening and he told me the opposite. (See my March 26 column) Somewhat skeptical, but desperate, I dove in, and here we are today.
I’d say the sense of touch in my feet has recovered back to the way it was about three years ago. The doc put it like this: “As of March 1 you had lost 61.4 percent in the right leg and had a 42.9 percent loss in the left. Now you’re at 37.1 in the right and 30 in the left.”
An early result where the difference between limbs sort of narrows like this (a difference of 18.5 percent to just 7.1) is typical, he said. As I continue a year’s worth of treatments with more screenings every 90 days we’ll see how that progresses.
“Sometimes one will catch up and they will be pretty close to even, sometimes the gap narrows and they both continue to move forward with that gap,” Lewis said.
My feet are far from feeling normal, but the difference after just three months is incredible, and I can’t wait to see what happens with nine more months of daily at-home treatments.
The treatments thus far
That’s what the foot-in-the-bucket deal is all about. Twice a day, for a half hour each time, I put my feet in a bucket with water, electrolytes and electrodes with pulsing electricity. Then I wrap each foot for 20 minutes in an infrared boot.
Additionally, the past 90 days, I was on a strict diet with special supplements, and twice a week I went to the clinic for spinal decompression, Shockwave therapy, and to treat my tootsies to 20 minutes of vibrating mechanical foot massage.
The diet resulted in a loss of 30 pounds. The doc reminds everyone that’s not what the diet is for but weight loss is not uncommon. It also got me past cravings for several cups of coffee a day, cleared up some lingering heartburn issues, and cured me of drinking soda pop; all good things.
Low-salt and low refined sugar meals are a habit now. More fresh vegetables and lean meats are the deal. Less bread, pasta, dairy and tomato sauces is a good thing. When the diet was over, I celebrated with a trip to our favorite Mexican restaraunt. I dove into those fajitas like a mad man.
The next day my hands and feet felt like balloons.
Yuk.
In very simple terms—without going into the detials of the various supplements and the Vasopro nitric oxide supplement that I continue to take—that fat and swollen joints feeling after my night of “celebration” is a basic illustration of what the restrictive diet was all about.
“The diet is essentially to put your body in the best environment to heal,” Lewis said. “It reduces inflammation and it can help tame auto-immune issues, diabetes, it deals with both sides of it, the cause and the inflammation.”
Listen to your gut
Palendromic Rheumatoic Arthritis hit me like a brick several years ago and I’ve found that RA is a gift that comes back in surprising ways. It can occasionally and temporarily cripple some joints but in the past it has put me out of hunting seasons due to vision issues (it caused the whites of my eyes to swell) and, now, apparently, a longer-term issue cropped up with neuropathy.
RA, essentially, is an auto-immune disease that causes sometimes extreme pain and swelling as my body just up and randomly decides to reject good things that it sees as an enemy—like an eyeball irritated by too much computer and camera work, hands and shoulders tired from typing all day, or my constantly punished feet.
“Most auto-immune issues come from the gut,” Lewis said. “Every year, more and more information comes, it doubles almost, on how important the gut microbiome and digestive elimination systems are and how they play into the health of the whole body.”
I am a happily strutting anecdotal example of that today, I believe. I haven’t taken any RA medicines for months and, so far, so good.
Here are the basics of my case so far.
I approached NeuroGen because the numbness in my feet had become dangerous for a guy who likes to do things outdoors. I tripped and fell flat on my face a couple of times and was lucky to escape serious injury or—worse—a broken camera lens or gun. I couldn’t feel the steps when I climbed into and out of my treestand. I couldn’t tell if my feet were growing cold or getting frostbitten on cold days.
I felt unstable on uneven terrain—and I’m a guy who never, ever, falls. I might stumble but I don’t fall, just like I might get turned around but I never get lost.
On my first evaluation at NeuroGen I was stunned to learn I couldn’t feel electric shocks through my feet that made the muscles in my forearms convulse when applied to my hands. Barefoot, I couldn’t stand more than a couple of seconds on one foot with the other lifted up by my knee. When I closed my eyes I could tell them when a soft filament brush touched my hands but had no idea if it touched any part of my feet.
In the third week of treatments they put gel on my foot for Shockwave treatment and, instead of feeling nothing and wondering when the thumping would start, I knew the gel was cold and when they rubbed it around it tickled the bottoms of my feet.
I couldn’t believe it.
At my 90-day checkup I stood on each foot for 30 seconds, no problem. Not only could I tell them that the fine brush touched my foot, but I could tell if it was on the top, bottom, left or right side of each foot.
Electric pulses? Well, I feel that now every day, twice a day. My feet are pink again. I hadn’t noticed how pale they had become.
Most importantly, I can jog or go for a long hike or mow the lawn without feeling like my feet and shins are full of needles afterwards. Those occasional hot-strike needle stabs are mostly gone, too. I hate those.
This stuff can get bad, real bad
“Wait,” you say?
You thought my feet were “numb.”
They were numb, they are numb. It’s a strange thing to explain, numbness with pain. That’s part of why I think it’s important to write about this. These sensations are pretty easy to ignore and think of as an annoyance that might just come with our mistreated bodies growing older. I’ve met several of the Doc’s patients and I’ll tell ya—I’m very glad I jumped on this when I did.
What I have in my feet now is a constant feeling like my toes and the balls of my feet are asleep. Everyone knows what that “tingling” sensation feels like. It’s numb, but it’s not entirely.
Lewis has lots of illustrations and technical ways to explain this, but my shorthand-seeking brain seized upon his explanation of the difference between “symptomatic numbness” and “functional numbness.” The functional kind is when you really, really can’t feel anything. My feet were headed towards that 75-percent-plus loss range.
“Some people come in and they only have pain, they have no numbness, tingling or balance issues,” he said. “Then some come in and they have numbness, but no pain or balance issues. And some come in and have balance issues but no pain or numbness. But usually it’s one, if you wait until it’s at the stage where it’s two or all three, then you can have a whole host of issues.”
People might assume there is no fix or they might wait until they can’t drive or can’t do their job, before they look for a fix. Lewis said one patient dropped a landscaping rock on his foot. It hurt, but he didn’t realize until he got home and took off his boot and sock that his foot was black-and-blue and he’d broken three bones.
“Breaking a bone, in and of itself, doesn’t hurt,” Lewis said. “It’s all the nerves that are bundled in that make it painful.”
Nerves are important little things indded. They cue blood circulation and they cue skin cell regeneration. People who know about diabetes and the sores it can cause and the injury and limb loss that can eventually result know all about this. Lewis has seen patients with skin essentially gone, muscle and bone exposed—and numb.
“They put on salves and creams and wraps, but they’re just treating the symptom,” he said.
Diabetes—or chemotherapy or auto-immune diseases or injuries—is the root, but the process at work is dying nerves, which halts the call for blood circulation and skin cell regeneration, which in turn leads to dying tissue, which leads to inflammation and loss of more nerves. It’s a vicious cycle.
The doctor spells it out more professionally, much more, but that’s the gist of it.
So, I’m bored and annoyed with soaking my feet twice a day and wrapping them in an infrared boot. I’m tired of my Vasopro smoothie every morning. But I sure am happy with my pink, tingly little piggies and the way I can feel the rocks under my boots these days.
Thanks for sharing this. I have been experiencing the same issues for far to long. I now know what can be done. Thanks again.