I actually have a LOT of numbness from surgeries as well as the opposite excruciating nerve damage lol (my nerves are *fragile*) so here’s my thoughts, advice, descriptions, and more! Yay!
Is actually much more complex than just *numb* which is actually super fascinating. At least for me, there are the classic dead spots where I feel nothing, but this numbness also has thicknesses. I had a knee reconstruction about ten years ago now, which caused some nerve damage from my knee down to my ankle, mostly just on the front side of the leg/shin area. I’m just numb in the skin on those areas but I can feel pressure and vibrations both in the muscles and surrounding areas. So a touch to those areas isn’t totally unfelt, but it’s very unclear? I know there’s *something* touching me but I can’t feel temperature, texture, pain, etc. I do cut myself shaving quite frequently there because of it, oops! but otherwise it does not affect my quality of life in the slightest.
Surrounding the numb areas are my *confused* areas lol. So nerves can actually heal but very slowly and not always correctly, so in areas were I have some returned sensation there are mixed signals. For example, if you were to run your hand down my shin I feel an intensely ticklish sensation in one spot of my ankle. The sensation of my knee is felt on my outer lower leg area, and it’s more of a vague tingling, which is odd because my outer leg area when it’s *actually* touched has no sensation. I say again, the *confused* areas. For my leg this confused sensation isn’t painful, neither is the numbness.
Let’s move onto my hip and shoulder! Aka, hell.
So post-shoulder surgery my entire arm went blissfully numb for about four hours. Full and totally numb. Was hitting my arm on things and had no idea. Also! For the skin-depth numbness of my lower leg, having just skin numbness doesn’t affect the function or my ability to know where in space my leg is, the total arm numbness DID. Anywho, when the sensation was returning it came back in the form of fire from hell in every nerve ending in my entire arm. Sensation in-general returned from the top of my arm and moved down my arm until the whole thing was burning. It was so extreme that I was in the ER hours after surgery and was admitted almost within an hour so they could get me on IV pain meds, sedation, etc. Nerve pain is some of the worst imaginable pain that can be felt. Thankfully it did slowly resolve over about three days and my arm is back to normal! Yay! No numbness or any issues since.
My hip is an odd mix of both problems but was not caused by surgery! Very curious, indeed! I sustained a very deep blunt trauma to the area which left a very large bruise and the skin totally numb at first. After a few days of healing that burning nerve pain sort of came in *stripes* across the area, as opposed to the diffuse pain from the arm. I had one particular *stripe* that wrapped from my hip all the way around my torso. The main area that sustained the trauma remained numb though. To this day there is numbness, confused bits, and the occasional burning pain I assume from slow healing as the injury was fairly recent.
Anyway, thanks for letting me overshare again, hope this helps the writers out there!
