by Ray Holder » Sat May 10, 2008 6:18 am
Hi Gotts
My story may be quite irrelevant, but there could possibly be a connection.
Three years ago I suffered a stroke, relatively mild, but bad enough for me to spend 2 months in rehab and having to learn to walk again. I still have a sensation permanently in my right arm, hand, leg and foot, something like mild pins and needles. While in hospital, I would be woken up with pain in my right heel. Another stroke victim in the same ward also had this problem.
I found that getting up and sitting on the side of my bed stopped the pain, and after a while deduced that my sense of feeling in my foot etc was being stimulated by nerve damage (not at the foot end, but at the brain end) and pressure from the weight of my leg and foot to my heel against the bed, normally ignored by my senses, was being additive in effect to the stimulus already there from the stroke damage. So it was felt as pain. My doctor later recommended me to have some sheepskin covering my heel in bed, I have a heel protector tubular fabric "sleeve" with thick lambswool down one side internally. I also have some sheepskin heel protectors, which are heel shaped, and have Velcro straps to secure them, but by the time my foot reaches the bottom of the bed, they have slipped halfway up my leg, and become useless.
My point in this tale is, could periphal neuropathy in the heel region from statin use be creating a backgroung stimulus level which the pressure due to the leg's weight additively makes it appear as pain in the heel? I would expect it to be relieved in normal sitting or walking positions. It might be worth considering before embarking on orthopaedic solutions.
Ray