How to get rid of numbness in toes: what my brother-in-law learned after he walked all day on a tack and never felt it

How to get rid of numbness in toes was the one thing my brother-in-law Gary searched for over and over that year, and the one thing he never once said out loud. Not to his wife. Not to his doctor, at first. Certainly not to his younger brother, my husband, who would have teased him about it until Thanksgiving.

Gary is 63. He taught shop at the high school for thirty-three years and still has all ten fingers, which he will tell you about whether you ask or not. He is the man in the family who fixes things. He fixed our porch swing, as a matter of fact, the one in that picture. So when he called on a Saturday night in June and said he'd done something stupid, Tom put him on speaker.

He had spent the whole day at his grandson's baseball tournament. Four games, two fields, a lot of walking between the bleachers and the concession stand. That night, when he finally took his sneakers off on the back step, his left sock was stuck to his foot. There was a thumbtack in the sole of his shoe, point up, and it had been in his foot since sometime that morning.

Two kinds of numb toes

If you've ever sat on your foot through a long movie, you know the first kind. Your foot "falls asleep." It goes heavy and dull, then it fizzes like soda when you stand up, and in a minute or two it's back. That kind of numbness is about pressure and blood flow. Something squeezed the nerve or the vessels for a while, and when you let go, everything wakes up.

Almost every tip you'll find for how to get rid of numbness in your toes is written for that first kind. And they're good tips. Get up and move. Wiggle your toes. Loosen your laces. Don't cross your legs. Soak in warm water. Wear wider shoes. If your toes are just asleep, all of that helps, and fast.

Gary had done every one of them for a year. He'd stand up and stomp in the garage. He bought two pairs of wide-toe shoes and a set of custom insoles from a foot clinic that cost him a little over three hundred dollars. He soaked his feet in the evenings while he watched the ballgame. Rita bought him compression socks for his birthday. And his toes stayed exactly as dead as they'd been the day before.

Because his were the second kind. The kind that doesn't wake up when you move. And for that kind, moving around was never going to be the answer, for the same reason that jiggling a light switch won't fix a bad wire in the wall.

What a lineman told him about the end of the line

Gary's fishing buddy is a man named Hank, 69, who spent thirty-eight years as a lineman for the power company, climbing poles in ice storms. When Gary finally told somebody about the tack, it was Hank, out on the lake, because Hank is the one person who wouldn't make a fuss.

Hank didn't make a fuss. He asked a lineman's question. "Is it the toes first? Not the heel?" Gary said yes, toes first, then the ball of the foot, creeping back. Hank nodded like that settled it. "That's not your shoes," he said. "That's your insulation."

Here is how he explained it, sitting in the boat, and I've never heard it put better. Every power line on a country road is wrapped in insulation. When the insulation cracks and wears, the current starts leaking out along the way. The houses near the substation never notice. It's the last house at the end of the road that gets the brownout first: lights dim, the fridge hums funny, and the people in that house think something's wrong with their fridge.

Your nerves are the same. Each one running down your leg into your foot is wrapped in a protective coating, a sleeve of fat and protein that keeps the signal running clean. When that coating wears thin, the signal leaks along the way, and the farthest point on the line, the toes, gets the brownout first. That's numbness. Not a nerve that's resting. A signal that's not arriving.

And the thing that really got under Gary's skin was what Hank said next. "A worn line doesn't fix itself because you stomp on the porch. Something's eating that insulation. You find out what, or the brownout keeps moving up the road."

So what is wearing the coating thin?

This is the part I went digging on, because Gary asked me to. He's handy, not a reader. And here is the honest version of what I found, with the parts I can't answer left open.

The coating on a nerve isn't a one-time thing. Your body is supposed to keep maintaining it, patching it as it wears, for your whole life. In a lot of people over fifty, according to what kept coming up, the balance tips. Something in the tissue around the nerve starts chewing at that coating faster than the body can repair it. Slowly enough that you don't notice, until the day you walk on a tack.

It's often described as an enzyme getting out of balance, and the people who study this don't all agree on why it happens in one person and not their brother. I'm not going to pretend I can settle that. But it changed how I looked at every "how to get rid of numbness in toes" list Gary had printed out. Every tip on them was about blood flow in the moment, or pressure, or comfort. Not one of them was about feeding the repair of the coating, or protecting it from what was wearing it down.

That's also why the burning he used to get at night had faded into numbness, and why that fooled him. "I figured it was getting better," he told me. "It stopped hurting." Hank had a word for that too. "Line goes quiet before it goes dead."

The other things he'd already tried

Besides the shoes and the stomping and the soaks, Gary had done the responsible things.

• He saw his doctor, eventually, after the tack. Blood work came back mostly fine. The doctor offered him a prescription for nerve pain. Gary read the side effect sheet in the pharmacy parking lot, saw dizziness and unsteadiness on it, thought about the ladder in his garage, and put the bag in a drawer.
• He took a B12 supplement for four months, because a man at church swore by it. His levels hadn't been low to begin with. His toes didn't notice.
• He tried a foot massager Rita found online. It felt nice. On the toes, it felt like nothing, which, he said, was sort of the whole problem.

Each of those may help somebody. But every one of them was either treating the moment or treating a shortage he didn't have. Nothing was aimed at the insulation.

What Hank had in his tackle box

It turned out Hank had been through his own version of all this two winters before, and he hadn't said a word either, because men like Hank don't. In the bottom tray of his tackle box, next to the spare hooks, was a bottle of capsules. He tossed it to Gary across the boat like a can of soda.

It was called NervoLyn. Gary's reaction, he admitted, was that he had a drawer full of things in bottles already. But Hank had climbed poles in ice storms for thirty-eight years and didn't believe in much, so Gary took a picture of the label to show me. That Sunday on the back steps, I put my readers on and read it out loud while he kept his shoe off for his foot check.

• Alpha lipoic acid. The company calls it one of the most researched antioxidants for the nerves in the hands and feet, there to help protect nerve tissue from the slow oxidative wear. "That's what's cracking the insulation," Gary said.
• Butcher's broom. An old European herb for circulation, there to keep blood moving down into the legs and feet. "Supply truck," he said. "Can't patch a line if the truck can't get down the road."
• L-carnitine and Coenzyme Q10. Both are about energy inside the cells, the fuel a nerve needs to do its own maintenance. "The crew has to eat."
• Turmeric extract standardized to 95% curcuminoids, for the body's normal inflammation response around stressed nerves. Not the kitchen spice, which he'd tried in his eggs.
• Magnesium glycinate, 80 mg, a gentle form of magnesium the company ties to calm nerve signaling and sleep.

He took the phone back and looked at it for a while. "It's a repair kit," he said. "Not a painkiller. Somebody thought about the whole line." Coming from a shop teacher, that's about the highest compliment there is.

He's not reckless, so he took the label to his doctor, who looked it over and didn't object. It's one capsule a day, which suited him. And the company offers a 60-day money-back guarantee, which, he said, was a better warranty than he got on the insoles.

What happened, and the week he almost quit

He takes his with his first cup of coffee in the garage. Here's the timeline the way he gave it to me at our Sunday foot checks, which Rita still doesn't know about.

• Week 1. Nothing at all. "Dead as a doornail," he reported, cheerfully, like he'd won a bet.
• Weeks 2 and 3. This is the week he almost quit. His toes started to tingle. Pins and needles, the kind he hadn't felt in months. He called it getting worse. I'd read that some people notice tingling in a numb area before more normal feeling returns. Nobody could promise him that's what it was, and I told him so. He kept going mostly out of stubbornness.
• Month 1. On our back steps, I ran a fingernail along the bottom of his left foot like I'd been doing every Sunday. He jerked his foot away. We both just looked at each other. Then he laughed so loud the dog barked.
• Months 2 and 3. The ball of his foot and three of his toes feel like they belong to him again on most days. The two smallest are still dull. He checks the inside of his shoes before he puts them on, every time, and I hope he always will. But he walked the whole fall tournament and came home with a clean sock.

Why so slow? Because nothing in it covers anything up. If insulation has been wearing thin for a year or more, the body does its patching on its own schedule, and the farthest point on the line is the last to get its power back. The company itself says most people notice early changes around three to four weeks, with fuller results building over eight to twelve weeks of daily use, and that it works best over three to six months. That's why Gary, who hates running out of anything, went to the six-bottle supply after his first one. "You don't fix half a line," he said.

Who this is for, and who it isn't

It may be worth a look if you're over 50, your toes or the balls of your feet have gone numb or dull and don't wake up when you move around, it started in the toes and has been creeping back, you've had your doctor check the basics, and the shoes, soaks, socks and single vitamins haven't changed it.

It is not for you if the numbness came on suddenly, is on one side of your body, comes with weakness in a leg or a drooping face, or you have a cut or sore on your foot that isn't healing. Those need a doctor today, not a supplement. And if you've stepped on something and didn't feel it, the way Gary did, get the foot looked at first. It's also not for you if you need your toes back by Saturday; Gary would tell you that's not how this goes. If you're pregnant or nursing, or you take medication for blood sugar, blood pressure, blood thinning or nerve pain, show your doctor the label first.

Why a man with a drawer full of bottles said yes

For Gary it came down to the guarantee and the math. NervoLyn's own page promises your money back within 60 days if you aren't happy. Nothing renews on its own and nobody bills you again later, and the bottles are made in Aurora, Colorado, in a GMP-certified plant. He'd already spent three hundred dollars on insoles that did nothing for the wiring. Two months of one capsule with his coffee, with his money back if nothing changed, was the cheapest bet he'd made all year.

Where he is now

Results vary, and his are his. Nobody has told Gary his nerves are healed, and he'd ask for the warranty in writing if they did. He still sees his doctor, still checks his feet, still won't tell Rita about the tack. But he stopped printing out lists of how to get rid of the numbness in his toes. "I quit trying to wake them up," he said. "I started fixing the line."

P.S. Last Sunday on the back steps, before I could even reach for his foot, Gary pulled off his sock and said, "Go ahead. I'll tell you which toe." He got four out of five. If you're the one who keeps finding things in your shoes at night that you never felt during the day, here is the bottle Hank tossed across the boat. And if you've been fighting the burning with jars from the kitchen, my friend Peggy's story about why her home remedies never reached the nerve is the other half of this one.

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