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Dear Pins and Needles:
What you described must be one of the strangest feelings in the world! Now, it's true that as a
worm I've never personally experienced that feeling, but if I did have legs with nerves in them,
I'm sure I would find it similarly strange!
But here's what's going on in your body: Throughout your body, you've got nerves, right? What
ARE nerves, you're asking? They're those threads of tissue that carry signals back and forth just
the way telephone wires do except these are between your brain and all parts of your body.
Your leg may have fallen "asleep" because you'd been sitting in the same position for a very
long time. Or it may have been because of the particular position you were sitting in. Either way,
particular nerves in your leg that lead to your spinal cord and then to your brain became so
squeezed, so compressed, that the signals they generally deliver couldn't get through properly.
When you finally tried to move your leg, you found you could still move it, but you couldn't
feel a thing when you did. It felt numb -- like a wooden leg. That meant that the nerves that
signaled the muscles in your leg to move, still worked. But the nerves that provide you with
sensation weren't working well. You were getting no feedback as your leg muscles moved.
And you discovered that it takes time for those nerves to recover after being squeezed. As
they began to stretch back to their regular shape and to send signals again, the nerves in your leg
were extremely sensitive. You began to feel sensation -- but strange sensation -- like "pins and
needles" -- until the nerves in your leg were back to functioning regularly again. Cool, huh?
Signed,
Wendell
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