It Started In My Left Foot. Now The Burning Is In Both — What I Wish Somebody Had Told Me At Stage One.

It Started As Tingling In Two Toes, And Because It Did Not Hurt I Ignored It

This is the stage everybody wastes, and it is the only cheap one.

Two toes, of an evening, no pain. Two years of that before I did anything.

Two smallest toes, left foot, of an evening. A faint fizzing, like the foot was waking up when it had not been asleep. No pain at all.

I mentioned it at a diabetes review and it went in the notes. Nobody was alarmed and neither was I. You do not go back to the GP about a foot that fizzes.

Here is what I did not understand: the tingling IS the nerve damage. It is not a warning that damage might start. It is the sound of small nerve fibres already misfiring, and it is the earliest and the most treatable point anybody gets.

If you are here right now, this is the part of the letter that is worth something. Tell your GP you want it looked at properly, and ask for a podiatry referral. Do not wait for it to hurt.

Then It Was Burning Every Night At Eleven, And Then The Right Foot Started

The spread is the part nobody warns you about.

Eleven at night, on the edge of the bed. The right foot started about eight months after the script did.

The fizzing became burning some time in the second year. Always at night, always about twenty minutes after I got into bed, and by then it was the whole front half of the left foot rather than two toes.

My GP put me on pregabalin — Lyrica — and it did take the top off it. It also fogged me up properly. I lost words. I put on weight. My ankles swelled, which is a funny thing to get from a drug you took for your feet.

Nothing here is a reason to change or stop anything your GP has put you on. A cream you rub into your feet is not an alternative to a script, and that conversation is one to have with the person who wrote it.

About eight months after that, the right foot started. Same two toes, same fizzing, same time of night. I knew exactly what it was and I sat on the edge of the bed and swore at it.

Nobody had told me it spreads, or that it goes in a pattern, or that the pattern is the same in nearly everybody.

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I Walked Around Half A Day With A Stone In My Boot And Never Felt It

This is the one that frightened me, and it is the reason I am writing this.

A bit of blue metal the size of a split pea. In there since morning, and I felt none of it.

Job in Eaglehawk, hot day, and I took my boot off in the ute at about two in the afternoon. There was a bit of blue metal in it, the size of a split pea, and a red mark on the ball of my foot where it had been sitting since morning.

I had felt nothing. Not a thing, all day.

That patch had gone quiet a few months earlier and I had been quietly pleased about it, because it was the one part of my foot that had stopped burning. It had not stopped burning. It had stopped reporting.

A foot that cannot feel a stone cannot feel a blister, a hot water bottle or a tack either, and that is the entire reason we are told to look at our feet every night. I had been told. I had not been doing it, because nothing hurt.

If you take one thing off this page: check your feet by eye every single night, especially the bits that have gone quiet, and see a podiatrist about any mark that does not clear.

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Numb Is Not The Burning Easing Off. It Is The Nerve Going Dark.

This is the bit of biology I wish somebody had drawn on a piece of paper for me in 2022.

A small fibre that has fired for years, beside one that has not.

Magnesium is what holds a nerve ending quiet. It sits in the gate on the surface of the nerve — the receptor that decides whether a pain signal gets sent — and it plugs that gate shut. When magnesium runs short, the gate stops closing properly. The nerve fires. And then it keeps firing. That is the burning. What you are feeling at two in the morning is not damage yet. It is a nerve ending stuck in the on position, running all night because there is nothing left to switch it off. Then the second stage, and this is the one nobody explains. A nerve ending that fires continuously inflames. Inflamed tissue in the worst-supplied part of your body starves of blood, and a small nerve fibre starved of blood dies back — patchily at first, then for good. The burning fades. What replaces it is numbness. Numbness is not the problem easing. It is the nerve going dark.

They call it nerve char. Two stages: years of firing, and then the going dark.

So the order most of us go in is tingling, then burning, then patches of nothing — and every one of us reads that last step as improvement, because it stopped hurting. That is the single most expensive misunderstanding in this whole business and I made it myself for months.

None of that means a quiet patch is beyond help, and I am not a clinician and cannot tell you what yours is. It means quiet is later than burning, not better than it, and it is a reason to do something rather than a reason to relax.

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High Blood Sugar Flushes Magnesium Out Of You, And Metformin Takes The B Vitamins

Two quiet subtractions that nobody mentioned to me in fourteen years.

Fourteen years on the same two boxes, and nobody ever mentioned what they quietly cost.

Low magnesium is common enough in type 2 diabetes to have its own literature. High blood sugar makes the kidneys flush magnesium out in the urine, and the longer the diabetes has run, the more of it goes.

So the mineral that is supposed to be sitting in that gate holding it shut is the one my kidneys have been pouring down the toilet since 2012. Fourteen years of it.

And metformin, which I have been on the whole time and am not about to stop, is known to lower B12 over the long run — there is a well-known 2010 BMJ paper on exactly that. Nerves run on B vitamins. Nothing here is a reason to change or stop anything your GP has put you on. A cream you rub into your feet is not an alternative to a script, and that conversation is one to have with the person who wrote it.

Neither of those is a scandal and neither is a reason to change your treatment. It is just arithmetic that nobody had ever put in front of me: the condition takes the mineral, the medication takes the vitamin, and the nerve endings at the far end of me were the last in line for whatever was left.

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I Had Been Taking Magnesium Tablets For A Year. They Were Never Going To Reach My Feet.

Right mineral, wrong route. And then something I could actually measure.

Ten spots on each foot, eyes shut, yes or no. Ask for it by name at your next podiatry appointment.

I had worked out the magnesium part on my own about a year earlier, off a diabetes forum, and I had been taking capsules from the chemist ever since. Nothing changed, so I assumed the forum was wrong.

Which is why the answer is magnesium, and why it goes on the foot rather than down your throat. A tablet is absorbed in your gut and shared out across your whole body, and your feet are the last stop on the worst-supplied circuit you have. Rubbed into the skin of the foot, it arrives where the gate is.

The tablets were not a waste of money — they were doing a job everywhere else. They were simply never aimed at my toes.

So I started with the cream instead. A fingertip of cream, morning and night, which for me is after the shower and again before bed.

Week one: the cold feeling, which is the menthol, and I slept better because of it. Nothing I would write a letter about.
Week three: I noticed I had not been awake at eleven for a few nights.
Week six: the monofilament test at the podiatrist.

That last one is the only thing on this page that is not my opinion. She presses a nylon filament against ten spots on each foot and you say yes or no with your eyes shut. In April I missed four spots on the left foot. In August I missed two. She wrote it down both times and she was the one who pointed at the difference, not me.

Two spots is not a cure and I am not claiming one. It is the first number attached to my feet that has gone the right way in four years.

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