Peripheral Neuropathy Quotes

In dreams sometimes it is like this. I am lying very still, my arms and legs are numb or paralyzed. There is a medical term—peripheral neuropathy. A tingling sensation in fingers and toes that moves upward bringing with it a loss of feeling, a spreading numbness, a kind of amnesia of the body.

The reason I said earlier that the mind is neither the Cartesian, highly intellectualized, cranium-confined firm-and-frozen ego, nor the self-effaced, world-immersed, flowing, field-like non-thingy occurrence, is that even though I was feeling my limbs to be alien to myself, that did not mean that I felt them to be disconnected. Rather, they were intimately connected, yet, merely connected to me, and not phenomenologically proper parts of myself. The mind-world boundary seems to have moved from the skin/environment junction to the innervated/denervated junction within the body. So part of the body has become external to the mind, or ‘de-minded’.

The majority of Lyme patients I see in my practice have peripheral neuropathy. It presents as burning sensations in different parts of the body, or tingling and numbness that often comes and goes. Patients usually describe this in the upper and lower extremities, and often on their face and scalp. Many patients have gone to the emergency room for a CAT scan of the head or an MRI of the brain to rule out a transient ischemic attack (TIA) or stroke/cerebrovascular accident (CVA), since they had numbness, which was new or increased, in one part of their body. The doctors would rule out a TIA or stroke and send them home without a diagnosis, often telling them to follow up with their primary care physician and a neurologist.