Thinking about phantom sensations

Here’s a post where I just let interesting things exit my mind.

With my below the knee amputation, my ghost foot always felt like it was stuck at right angle encased in a cozy boot. My phantom knee is different.

My phantom leg keeps feeling like it’s sticking straight out and I don’t like that feeling. It often feels hyperextended even to the point of 90 degrees backward. It feels like the tendons of the back of my knee are being overstretched to get into that position which, as you can imagine, is uncomfortable. It isn’t really painful but it’s uncomfortable. It also makes me uneasy. When I’m in my wheelchair I’ll get this feeling that I might bump my straight, unleg into the wall. My above knee nub does not go past the seat of my chair so it's not even possible to bump it into a wall.

I’ve been trying to find ways to make that straight legged feeling stop. I’m sure it’s due to the cut muscles and tendons being swollen and stretched which my brain is interpreting as hyperextension of a knee that doesn’t exist.

Except the gone knee does exist. I have brain tissue devoted to it in the map of my body in my postcentral gyrus. It might not be down there (on my body), but it’s still up there (in my brain) in a very real physical sense.

It’s not painful so much as annoying and uncomfortable.

Anyway I’ve been doing activities that I’d normally do with it bent to try to trick my brain into making it feel bent. Things like:

*Sitting on my other leg.

*Putting something under my thigh nub to simulate the feeling of my old BK nub under my thigh. I used to tuck it under all the time.

*Using a mirror and mirror therapy to trick myself into thinking I have a leg and then bending it.

*Sitting in positions that would be impossible with my leg straight

*massaging it while looking at it to tell my brain it’s not there no mo.

*pressing my nub gently against a wall or hard surface, which isn’t possible with a full leg (at least not that I know of???)

*kneeling on all fours and gently swinging my nub like a pendulum, which I couldn’t do with an intact leg

*Sitting on the edge of a chair and lifting my butt slightly as if I’m going to stand up. That makes my not-leg feel like it’s also bent in that position. I guess because my brain wants them both to be bent in order to stand up without falling over

*Just standing, which does not make my leg feel bent but it’s supposed to feel straight in that instance so it stops feeling hyperextended.

Knees don’t have a whole lot of nerves devoted to skin perception (think about the time you cut your knee and didn’t notice) but a whole lot of nerves for proprioception. It’s what enables us to walk. We have to have a good sense of where our knee is located in space. I’m sure that’s why my phantom sensations related to my knee are basically all proprioceptive.

Contrasting with my foot, most of those phantom sensations are of needles, shocks, itching...I haven’t felt any of that on the new missing parts. The position of my phantom foot has never bothered me.

ANYWAY THIS IS FASCINATING AND I THOUGHT YOU’D FIND IT FASCINATING TOO