As regular readers may know, like too many people with brain injury, I have thermoregulation issues. That means I’ve run too hot for over a decade. (I write about possible reasons why in my book Concussion Is Brain Injury.) But I haven’t talked about my cold feet and the strange phenomenon of being far too hot in my torso and head and far too cold in my feet and legs. My acupuncturist used to rebalance the heat so I was properly warm head to toe. The treatment never lasted too long, and back I’d go to being hot and cold in the same body.
I didn’t do much for my cold feet because it was the heat that posed the danger to me and sent me to the ER back in 2007. But the heat has cooled down year after year to closer to normal levels with the neuroplastic treatments I’ve been receiving. So I’ve been noticing more the cold in my feet and legs. For the last little while, the cold has worsened in my feet; nightly it begins to creep up my calves to my knees. I feel like I’m slowly turning into ice from the bottom up. It’s always way worse at night (at the opposite end of the night as the heat was).
The laser therapy clinic I go to has recently retained a new doctor, and he decided we should rule out blocked or spastic arteries being the cause. I heard nothing then suddenly I was given 24-hours notice to go to the vascular lab at the hospital I have traumatic memories of. Unbelievably, the lab was on the same floor as the behavioural cardiologist I went to for a few visits in one of those utterly futile attempts to do something about my heart (hence, one source of grief). I also didn’t know how I was going to navigate this hospital, which is normally a zoo, with my new vision. My brain still demands help remapping all first-time-since-the-surgery venues. Sigh. And indoor spaces with people moving in all different directions and sound bouncing loudly off surfaces makes it harder than outdoor spaces.
But no matter, I asked for help at the info desk. Getting a brain injury means you’d better get used to asking for help over and over and expecting you’ll have to negotiate for it, too, almost every time and forging into protracted negotiation that’ll come with a price when people say no. But I digress.
I received help and even better, the place was like a morgue. I have no idea how I lucked out! It made navigating the space infinitely easier. The weird thing is that the place seemed a lot smaller than before my eye surgery. It’s like having true binocular vision has shrunk spaces and even devices like my iPhone in my perception.
The vascular lab takes your blood pressure super quick in your arms, legs, ankles. An ultrasound wand is faster than regular blood pressure equipment! Then the technician begins to sound your arteries with ultrasound to produce colour pictures of your blood flow with the grey landscape of your arteries and surrounding tissues. Blue for 24 cm/s; red for -24 cm/s. Every artery she found, she’d listen to the blood flow. Hearing the strong beating whoosh whoosh of my blood pumping through my abdominal aorta, arteries extending into my thighs, arteries behind my knees, was pretty sweet. The strength lessened on my ankles and the arteries in my feet were very difficult to find. Ultrasound needs fat to bounce off to create a picture of the arteries, and feet don’t have fat up top (or at least mine don’t). No beat. Ten percent of the population apparently has no discernible pulse in their feet. Welcome to the ten, Shireen! Even the beat from a couple of points on my ankles sounded like it came from far off and was high pitched unlike the arteries at the other end of my legs. Their beat was deep, like a bass or baritone.
What did this all mean? I have “absolutely gorgeous arteries.” My arteries aren’t the reason for the cold in my feet and creeping up my legs.
Since the low-intensity light therapy (laser therapy) over the bottom part of the spine warms up my feet and keeps the ice from creeping up at night, the nerves coming out of the spine there were probably affected. The lap belt would’ve cinched after the first impact in the car crash. It would’ve stayed cinched during the next two impacts, pressing into my body. Peachy. Cranial nerves stretched, reducing my saliva, increasing risk of cavities sans me knowing because no one thought to look nor monitor. And looks like same with spinal nerves where the lap belt was and no one thought to look nor go over the possible sequelae and what I should do about them, like wear socks to bed. I’d never had to before so didn’t think about it until I heard of someone doing that a couple years ago.
And now today, I have a light therapy home unit I can use to keep my feet warmer and a clinic to go to where they can help me deal with these perplexing issues. Brain injury doesn’t arrive alone. It comes with friends who need treatment, too.
