Good Numbers. Burning Feet. The Reason No One Gave Her.

Sleeping with your feet hung off the edge of the bed? Up at 2am running cold water over them while the house stays quiet? Your numbers finally good, and your feet still on fire? I watched my wife do all of it, blame herself for all of it, and never once get told the real reason.

I reached across the bed at 2am and her side was cold again.

I knew where she'd be. The sofa, or the edge of the tub with the tap running cold over her feet, or standing in the dark kitchen because lying still made the burning worse.

She'd hear me and say she was fine, go back to bed, she was sorry she woke me. She was always sorry.

Here is the part I kept turning over. Her numbers were good.

Every appointment, they told her so, the A1C down where they wanted it, the weight off, the bloodwork clean.

And every appointment she came home a little quieter, because if she'd done everything right, then her feet still burning at night had to be something she was doing wrong. No one ever told her it wasn't.

I don't have what she has. I can't tell you what it feels like.

I can only tell you what it did to her, and what it took me too long to go looking for.

So let me start with who I am, and why I'm the one telling this instead of her.

My name is Daniel Forsythe. For thirty-one years I taught high school shop, which means I spent my life fixing what other people had given up on, and I'm not used to sitting in a room with a problem I can't put my hands on.

I don't have diabetes. My feet have never burned a day in my life.

I'm the one who sleeps next to the person whose feet do, which turns out to be its own kind of education.

Marianne and I have been married thirty-four years. For most of them I was the heavy sleeper.

That stopped about three years ago, and I never told her it had.

I started waking before she did, listening for whether she was still in the bed.

What I Learned To Listen For

The first thing I noticed was the sheet.

She started sleeping with her feet out from under the covers, hung off the end of the mattress, even in January. I asked once if she was cold and she said the weight of the blanket on her toes was worse than the cold.

I didn't understand that, so I did what most people do with something they don't understand. I let it go.

Then it was the kitchen. Two, three in the morning, the click of the hall light, the sound of the tap running cold in the bathroom sink while she stood there with one foot and then the other under the water.

She thought she was being quiet. She was.

I just wasn't asleep.

I can't tell you what the burning felt like. She used the word bad, and Marianne isn't a woman who says bad when she means something smaller.

I can tell you what it did.

It moved her out of our bed and onto the couch most nights, so she could prop her feet up and not keep me awake, and so I'd stop asking if she was alright.

That was the cost nobody put a number on. We'd slept in the same bed for thirty-four years, and a burning she couldn't explain to anyone had quietly moved her into the next room.

What I Watched Her Try

She tried before I ever started looking. That's the part people miss about being the one who watches.

By the time you notice, they've already been fighting it alone for a while.

I found out the way you find out anyone you love has been quietly hurting. In the cabinet.

A tube of numbing cream, mostly used. Cooling spray.

Three packs of special socks, the tags still on two of them, because her feet couldn't stand socks.

A bag of supplements a forum had promised would work if she gave it months, and she'd given it months.

The Eight Minutes I Sat Through

The worst of it was an appointment I went to with her.

Her endocrinologist, a pleasant man I'll call Dr. Halvorsen, pulled up her chart, and his face did something I won't forget. He was pleased.

"A1C of five-seven, down from where we started. Marianne, this is exactly what we want to see."

She'd told me in the car she was going to bring up the nights. She did.

She said her feet burned so badly she hadn't slept in our bed in weeks.

He nodded the way you nod at weather. He told her the burning often eases as the numbers hold, gave her a prescription for the nights, and asked about her next bloodwork.

I sat in the chair against the wall and watched a man congratulate my wife on a number while the actual reason she was exhausted sat in the room with us, unmentioned.

I didn't say anything. I'm not a man who makes scenes.

But somewhere between that office and the parking lot, I stopped believing the people with the charts were going to be the ones to fix this.

There was no single terrible night. People expect there to be one.

There wasn't.

There was just a Tuesday. I woke around four, and her side was cold, and I knew without getting up that she was on the couch with her feet on the armrest.

I'd found her there a hundred times before. This time I didn't go back to sleep, and I didn't go tell her to come to bed.

I lay there and decided I was done waiting for a doctor to be curious about my wife's feet.

That was all it was. A quiet decision in the dark on an ordinary night.

I got up, made the coffee, and opened my laptop while she slept sitting up in the next room.

What I Found At Four In The Morning

I'm not a researcher. I'm a shop teacher who knows how to read a manual and follow a thread to the end.

So for a few weeks I read the way I used to rebuild a transmission, one part at a time. Diabetic forums.

The same complaint over and over, the burning, the nights, the good numbers that didn't help.

And under it, more than once, people describing something that had finally let them sleep after everything else failed.

My first thought was that this was one more miracle sold to desperate people. I'd watched Marianne waste three hundred dollars on exactly that already.

I almost closed the laptop.

But the people writing about it didn't sound like they were selling anything. They sounded like her.

Same feet, same nights, same flat way of not letting themselves hope.

So I didn't tell Marianne. I didn't want to hand her one more dead end.

I ordered it myself and waited for the box.

The box came on a Thursday. I left it on my workbench for two days before I said anything, because I wanted to understand what I'd bought before I handed it to her.

So I did what I do with any part I don't trust yet. I read until it made sense.

What The Numbers Could Not Reach

Here's what I worked out, in plain terms, after thirty-one years of explaining machines to sixteen-year-olds.

The body makes its own calming compound. It's called PEA, and it releases right where a nerve is inflamed, to settle the signal before it gets loud.

In a body that's run high for years, the supply falls behind the demand, the brake wears down, and the nerve keeps firing long after the blood sugar has been brought back into line.

Which finally explained the part that never made sense to me.

Any shop teacher could draw you the rest. 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's why none of it had worked. The creams numbed the top of her skin.

The socks and the soaks fought what she could feel and never reached what was firing.

The gabapentin turned the volume down without asking why the signal was screaming, and the number she was so proud of only ever shut off the gas.

The box was still on the bench. I knew what was in it now.

I just hadn't worked out how to give it to her without raising a hope I couldn't promise.

Why The Same Script Every Time

I am not angry at Dr. Halvorsen anymore. Anger takes energy, and I stopped spending it on a system that was never going to spend any back on her.

I understand it now, which is worse in its own way. The standard of care measures one number and treats that number as the job finished.

The burning that moved my wife to the couch doesn't bill the way the A1C does.

And the compound that calms it can't be patented, because the body already makes it for free.

Nobody is paid to recommend a compound your body makes on its own, so nobody does.

The script defaults to the drug with a sales rep, and the brake her own body had run short of never came up in any eight-minute appointment we ever sat through.

She was not careless. She did everything they told her, which was the whole trouble, because what they told her was never built to reach it.

I gave it to her on a Tuesday, with the label turned so she could read it.

Youfirst PEA 600MG, micronized.

I told her what I'd told myself, that it was six hundred milligrams, the same amount I kept seeing in the study notes, ground fine enough that a body could take it in instead of passing it through.

I kept my voice flat. I'd watched her hope and lose too many times to sell it to her.

I just said it was worth four weeks, and that I'd already paid for it.

What I Started Watching For

For the first time in three years I stopped sleeping with one ear open for the sound of her getting up.

She said it out loud only once. We were doing the dishes and she told me, not looking up, that she'd forgotten what it was to not think about her feet.

Then she went back to the plates. Marianne isn't a woman who makes speeches.

A man wrote under a post I'd left up, months later. His wife, type 2, numbers good for a year, still awake every night with her feet.

He'd found the same answer I had, a few weeks behind me.

He didn't thank me. He just said his wife was sleeping, and that he'd forgotten what the house sounded like quiet at night.

I'm not one to push anything on strangers. But I left that post up, and men like the one who wrote me keep finding it, so I'll tell you what I tell them.

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

The first few nights nothing changed, and if what you need is something for tonight, the gabapentin does that and this doesn't.

What this does is work on the reason the nerve is firing, and that took her the better part of a week.

If it does for the person you're worried about what it did for Marianne, the first thing you'll notice is the same thing I did. Around the fourth or fifth night, she stops leaving the bed.

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