Anecdote on neuropathy from my A&P professor I'm pre-nursing. Here's an anecdote straight from my A&P professor, who worked as a nursing assistant in her youth. She wanted to give us a real-world example for our section on neuropathy and communication. Judging by her age, this probably happened around 1995. Warning, gross: "I was working four nights a week at the West hospital (there are four in our city), when a man came in on a gurney. I'll never forget that, the smell. I found out from Jake (EMT?) that the reason he was in was because he'd called the police because he was unable to stand up. They figured he was an older man who'd fallen, so they sent an ambulance. When they got there, there was this small, like, very sick little lab that was maybe six or seven months old. They found the patient in a large reclining sofa in the living room." My professor cut off the narrative there, saying,  "Oh, he was in the emergency room because he was missing his toes. That was my point. Hah, yeah, like, all of them. He couldn't figure out why he was having trouble standing - of course he was having trouble standing. He weighed, like, I don't know...shit, at least 500 pounds.? But he insisted he never had trouble standing normally. We thought he had to be...he was probably lying about how long he'd been in the chair. The little puppy-dog was trying to lick his feet to get his attention, I think, and eventually, she probably licked them so much that they started to bleed, and it seems like she just kept licking and gnawing on them that eventually it wore the toes down. There's no way he was feeding her. No way he could walk that far. He didn't notice because, like we talked about, the signals were inhibited and the nerves are damaged. Oh, and she...the puppy-dog...she crawled into his lap and did the same thing to his genitals. That's a...yeah, they were just...gone.  So, it's not just the distal extremities that can experience neuropathy. Remember that. And that's why you should never have a dog. Hahaha, I'm kidding. That's why you shouldn't get fat."