The Burning Your Falling A1C Was Never Going To Fix

Hanging your feet off the edge of the bed at 2am? Doing blood-sugar math in the dark while they burn? Your A1C finally looks great and your feet still feel like hot coals? You lowered the number, exactly like they told you. And the burning never got the memo.

I lowered my A1C from 7.0 to 5.6, did everything they told me, and my feet still burned like I'd done nothing at all.

Three years of food logs on the fridge.

The walking.

The weight.

I earned that number.

And the reward was lying awake at 2am with my feet hanging off the edge of the bed, doing blood-sugar math in the dark. Telling myself it had to be my fault, that I'd slipped, eaten something, that one slice of cake had f***ed up the whole night.

It wasn't the cake. It was never the cake.

Every doctor who clapped me on the back for that A1C handed me a gabapentin script and a pamphlet about circulation. And not one of them told me the truth: getting the number down was never going to put the fire out.

They let me believe it would. They let me blame myself when it didn't.

So before I tell you what I finally figured out, the thing no one with a clipboard ever said to me. You need to know who I am, and why I spent three years certain it was my fault.

My name is Sharon Maddox, and for thirty years I ran payroll for a mid-size trucking outfit, which means I trust numbers more than I trust people.

Numbers don't flatter you.

They don't tell you what you want to hear.

So when the doctor said type 2, I did what I've always done. I logged every meal on a sheet taped to the fridge, weighed myself the same morning each week, and walked the same two miles whether I felt like it or not.

What I didn't write down anywhere was that my feet had started burning at night. I told myself that part would take care of itself once the numbers came down.

I had a system, and the system had never failed me before.

The Part I Didn't Log

The burning didn't take care of itself.

It came at night, always at night. By nine or ten the rest of me would wind down and my feet would start up, like the wiring had its own schedule that ignored mine.

Some nights it was a deep ache. Some nights it was a quick electric jab through the top of the foot that made me suck air through my teeth.

I stopped being able to wear socks to bed. I couldn't stand the weight of the sheet on my toes, so I slept with my feet hung off the end of the mattress where the air could reach them.

One Tuesday I got up at two in the morning and stood at the bathroom sink running the cold tap over my feet, because cold was the only thing that touched it. I stood there until my back ached.

Then I went back to bed and lay there doing the math on what I'd eaten, looking for the mistake.

Ray rolled over and asked if I was alright. I said I was fine.

I'd started saying I was fine the way other people say good morning.

The Drawer Full Of Wasted Money

I want to tell you what I refused to try first, because that's the part I'm least proud of.

When my sister mentioned a supplement her neighbor swore by, I told her I wasn't about to hand money to a company counting on desperate diabetics. I said real medicine comes from a doctor.

I said I'd fix this the same way I fixed the numbers, with discipline.

So I went the respectable route, and the respectable route emptied my wallet just the same.

A lidocaine cream the pharmacist recommended.

Forty dollars, and it numbed the skin for about twenty minutes.

Cooling sprays.

Three pairs of diabetic socks, sixty dollars, for feet that couldn't tolerate socks at all.

A paraffin foot bath that promised circulation and gave me a warm tub to sit at while the burning rolled on underneath. Then alpha lipoic acid and benfotiamine, because a forum said give it weeks, so I gave it months.

But the most expensive thing I tried was trusting the man whose whole job was supposed to be this.

Eight Minutes And A Printout

My endocrinologist was a careful, friendly man I'll call Dr. Pruett, because that was his name.

At my March appointment I set the food log on his desk where he couldn't miss it, and I told him my feet burned so badly at night I hadn't slept properly in months.

He looked at the log, then at his screen, and he smiled at the number.

"Five-six.

That's excellent, Sharon.

Whatever you're doing, keep doing it."

I said, but my feet.

He was already typing.

He told me the burning should settle as the numbers stayed down, that nerves take time, and that he'd put me on gabapentin for the nights.

He handed me the printout.

The visit ran eight minutes.

I'd waited five weeks for it.

He billed my insurance for telling me to be patient with the one part of my body that was screaming.

I sat in the parking garage afterward and did not cry. I gripped the wheel until my hands hurt, because crying would have meant I still believed it was my fault.

And some quiet part of me had finally stopped believing that.

It was my granddaughter Mia's sixth birthday. Yellow cake with the waxy frosting roses, my daughter's kitchen, thirty people, a bounce house going in the yard.

I ate a slice, because saying no meant explaining, and explaining meant turning a six-year-old's party into a conversation about my feet.

So I smiled.

I sang.

I sat in a hard kitchen chair at the edge of the room because standing on the tile had become too much, and I watched everyone I love have an ordinary afternoon.

My daughter crouched down next to me and asked if I was okay. I said I was fine.

I'd done everything right for three years, and I was sitting at my granddaughter's party performing a woman who wasn't in pain.

For the first time the thought that came was not what did I eat, or where did I slip.

It was simpler, and it was furious.

This is not my f***ing fault.

I drove home already done waiting for it to ease on its own.

The Comment I Refused To Believe

It came from the same sister I'd snapped at.

She didn't argue with me. Months later she just sent a screenshot of a comment from a woman in a diabetic group.

The woman was about my age, same story, A1C dragged down out of the sevens, feet still on fire every night.

She wrote that she'd stopped hanging her feet off the end of the bed.

That she was sleeping again.

That one thing had finally done it after everything else failed, and she named it.

I read it standing in my kitchen at eleven at night, and my first thought was the thought I always had. Another miracle for sale, another company counting on a desperate woman with burning feet.

I'd spent three years and two hundred and forty dollars being right about exactly that.

So I told myself I wouldn't order it. I told myself that twice.

Then I thought about the chair at Mia's party, and I got out my card.

The box took five days. I spent four of them doing the homework I should have done before any of it.

I'm a numbers person, so I went looking for the number that explained me. Why a woman with a 5.6 still had feet on fire every night the number swore she was fine.

The Off-Switch No One Mentioned

Here's what three years of appointments never told me.

Your body makes its own calming compound. It's called PEA, and it releases on demand at the places where nerves and tissue are inflamed, to quiet the signal before it runs away from you.

In a diabetic body under years of strain, the demand outpaces the supply, the off-switch your body relies on can't keep up, and the nerve keeps firing long after the blood sugar has been wrestled back into line.

Which is the whole thing, finally said plainly.

It's the difference between shutting off the gas line and putting out the fire already burning in the room.

Turning off the gas is necessary.

It does nothing for the flames already lit.

That one idea explained every dollar in my drawer.

The creams numbed the skin and never reached the nerve.

The socks and the soaks fought the symptom.

The gabapentin muffled the signal without ever asking why it was screaming, and the A1C, the number I'd bled for, only ever turned off the gas.

None of them put out the fire. None of them topped up the off-switch my own body had run short of.

So the only question left was whether what was coming in the box held enough of it to matter.

Why The Script Is Always The Same

Dr. Pruett wasn't a bad man. He did exactly what the system trained him to do, and the system is the thing I came to be angry at.

The standard of care for a diabetic measures one number and treats that number as the finish line. Bring the A1C down and the chart reads treated.

The burning that keeps a woman upright at 2am doesn't have a billing code that pays the way the A1C does.

And the compound that calms it can't be patented, because your own body already makes it. There's no sales rep for a molecule no one owns.

So the script defaults to the drug with a patent and a rep, and the off-switch your body is running short of never comes up in the eight minutes you're allotted.

The model did not overlook my feet by accident. It was built to stop looking the moment the number came down.

I was not a fool for believing the number was the whole answer. I was doing exactly what every chart, every congratulations, and every five-week wait had trained me to do.

The bottle said Youfirst PEA 600MG, micronized.

I read the label three times.

Six hundred milligrams, the same dose as the one study that had bothered to look.

Micronized, which the company explained meant the particles were ground small enough for a body to actually absorb, instead of passing through the way half my drawer had.

I almost left it on the counter for a week.

Old habit.

The skeptic in me wanted to be right one more time.

The Fourth Night I Almost Missed

Three weeks in, I made dinner, ate it sitting down with Ray, and went to bed on my own side of the bed without once doing the math on what it would cost me.

Ray noticed before I said anything. He asked one night if I was alright, the way he'd asked a hundred times, and I realized I hadn't said the word fine in weeks, because for once it would have been true.

A woman named Carol from a diabetic group I'd joined posted almost the same week I did. Sixty-one, type 2, A1C down to 5.8 and proud of it, feet still on fire every night her chart called her a success.

She'd been sleeping on the couch for a year. Same feet, same number, same flat surprise that what finally worked was the one nobody in a white coat had ever mentioned.

I'm not in the habit of recommending anything to strangers. But I spent three years and a drawer full of money being wrong about this, so I'll tell you what I now tell the women in that group who sound exactly like I did.

Let me tell you what it isn't, first, because that's how you'll know I'm being straight with you.

It isn't fast. The first three nights it did nothing, and if what you want is something that knocks the pain out within the hour, gabapentin does that and this doesn't.

What this does is work on the reason the nerve is screaming, and that takes a week or two, not an hour. If you're looking for overnight, save your money.

If it works for you the way it worked for me, the first thing you notice will be the same thing I did. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth night, your feet stay under the covers and you sleep until morning.

Later is one more night with your feet hung off the end of the bed.

Later is one more family table you sit out at the edge of.

Later is another two hundred dollars in a drawer that never worked.

Later ends the night you finally top up the off-switch your body ran short of.

This is the one I take every morning now. See if it's still in stock where you are.