More On Benumbing Denumbing

Well, my numb foot didn't bother me hugely, for I had been told by a doc that diabetics do get now hot now cold sensations in their feet.

During the last year's whole body check up I mentioned to the young lady inspecting my nervous system that numbness in feet is normal amongst diabetics. She reacted, rather reared up like a scared horse, and told me in no uncertain terms that no numbness can ever be normal.

That dart stayed in the stormy petrel that my mind happens to be, and the haunted chamber with whimsical flashes that it can become now and then... and when I started stumbling too often on wobbly feet, I sought expert help. Well that was two months or more, ago. Things had come to a sorry pass by then, I was slipping and falling in bathroom without any soap on the floor, and at times I felt hallucinations. The floor, hard solid ceramic tiled floor would feel as if muddy up to a depth of an inch or more. Sometimes the floor would tilt. But the worst effect was being helpless whilst falling. How many face-smashing bone-crunching and blood-curdling accident possibilities passed me by would make a litany of miracles.

The youngish doctor at a speciality hospital laughed at the idea of a brain scan (been an incurable hypochondriac, so new symptoms and tests get my adrenaline pumping like nobody's business. Almost with the fierceness of a Russian pump. Why Russkie? Well, they like to do things big. In the 1960s their science magazines had reported a pump large enough to empty out a whole river in spate....whew, mind boggling indeed. That was the time when they had made cranes big enough to dig out and lift up five storeyed buildings from a street to the next. Wow.
At the end of my fatigued list of symptoms the good doc laughed again and started me off on a regime of tonics and medicines aimed at the nerves.

The first month seemed like a chain of miniscule miracles stringed up together... my benumbed feet became alive. I could feel the sensations creeping right back into portions that must have been dead for months not weeks. It was rather like the temporary numbness induced by sitting in some clumsy posture for hours... even the pinpricks that a normal person feels whose nerves have not been mauled by long term diabetes, returned. It was fun to realize and tell myself :
hey I used to feel like that before 2000 or like this before 1996.

On my second visit to the immensely good doc I made the mistake of telling him, based on his explanations and my extrapolations that probably my sensitivity, newly gained was a bit too much, so he changed one medicine. Another time I told him my motor nerves had not gained so much as the sensor nerves. Another doc would have seen to it that the bouncers threw me into the river nearby. But not our cool cat. He looked amused, as if his pet dog had claimed he could ride the bike... so he made me lay down on the couch and hammered my ankles and pressed here and there. Finally he made me stand up with feet touching each other and watched me sway a little with my eyes closed. I have been doing this, a little cheating during the Friday prayers at the mosque -where nine out of ten guys around me seem to be swaying much more than me.

Strangely enough, the doc said my diagnosis was right. Whew, I was thrilled. This probably coincided with hearing from a lady adminsitrator at a medical institute in Chandigarh. I have been mailing proposal to such establishments to run a 1-day o 2-day workshop on advanced materials for surgeons and medical folks. There are indeed magical new materials available in the market and not too visible. Materials like shape memory alloys that remember a particular shape given to a piece at a certain temperature. Plunge this piece into cold water, and the shape changes. For yet another shape, shove it into boiling water.

Doctors today carry one surgical device instead of several... cold water makes the tool it had serrations (like a hack saw blade or a file) and hot water makes it remember it had a sharp piercing point. To lend a little panache and flair to my feeler I had sent a list of ten queries to be asked to the good docs, if anyone could answer even two, he or she didn't need my course. Another medical society in Bangalore has bitten the bait too. So things are taking a positive new turn in a new direction, these days. A whole gamut of new challenges cropping up...

cheerz!

(c) Max Babi 040307