she came to me again last night

like a lover under cover of darkness,

a succubus threatening to consume my

essence, body and soul.

she nibbles at my toe,

at first playfully, the teasing of

a skillful courtesan practiced

in the arts of seduction,

before her gaudily painted lips part

slowly, lasciviously, her confident

smile transmogrifying into

attacking fangs piercing my foot

again and again and again,

venom injected excruciatingly,

spreading slowly through me

like a pool of blood expanding  beneath

an exsanguinating corpse—

my ardent prayers for relief

ascending on stone ears:

there will be no exorcism

for me this night.

Diabetic neuropathy, according to WebMD, “is damage to the nerves that allow you to feel sensations such as pain. There are a number of ways that diabetes damages the nerves, but they all seem related to blood sugar being too high for a long period of time. 

“Diabetes-related nerve damage can be painful, but it isn't severe pain in most cases.”

Well, I’m not “most cases,” it would appear.

The sensations I experience when neuropathy strikes are difficult to describe with any degree of accuracy; I have tried on numerous occasions, and my answers always seem lame, a pale shadow of the actual sensation.  The closest I can get is to compare the attacks to the insertion of white-hot needles into the toes, foot, or ankle; sometimes, any combination of the above.  Imagine the needles being driven in and held in place for two or three seconds before being removed.  Occasionally, the neuropathy causes cramping in the foot during the time the “needles” are inserted.  Perhaps this description conveys a sense of the symptoms.

Generally, I experience this neuropathy once or twice a month.  The attacks usually last from a couple of hours to all day.  There is no medication I have found that prevents the onset of the assaults.  I tried gabapentin, a medicine originally developed as an anti-epileptic, but it was a) expensive, b) caused intestinal side effects and permanent lethargy, and c) didn’t work.  When I feel a significant episode occurring, I fight the severe pain with a prescribed dose of Percocet ®.  Sometimes the drug eliminates the pain altogether, and sometimes it merely dulls it and makes it easier to deal with.  Sometimes, as in last night’s episode, it does nothing.

I’ve had two severe attacks in the last week, once on Monday night and once last night.  In each case, restful sleep was difficult to achieve, causing me to be irritable (really, Ken?  How can we tell?) and infusing me with a sense of fatigue and depression.

All of which is to explain my irregular appearances in these pages of late and the brevity and prosaic nature of those entries.  I am hopeful of returning to normal before long.

If this is NEWropathy, can I try the old one instead?

All text except the passage from WebMD.com cited above © 2009, Kenneth M. Rhodes