Well I woke up to my arm essentially dead. I realized I could move stuff, but I might as well have been paralyzed because I had no idea that my fingers were doing what I told them. The whole arm was numb. Luckily, it seems, my body has a way of waking me whenever this happens and I sat up and moved it around a bit, allowing circulation to flow. My question is, how long before I had a “Requim for a Dream” style lump of an arm?
I don’t know the answer to your question but I can add my experience.
A couple of years ago I would often wake up with a ‘dead’ arm (I could move it but not feel it. sometimes I moved it onto my face. It felt like someone else arm when I did that). It usually took about a minute to bring it to life.
It doesn’t happen anymore, but I do often wake up with the same feeling in the little finger on my left hand.
Pythagras, it certainly IS possible to permanently damage an appendage by lying on it too long. However, as you noted, normally our bodies sense when the circulation is being impaired or a nerve is being too severely compressed, and our brains send us a signal to move before any permanent damage is done. The situations where that doesn’t happen are ones where the person is too deeply unconscious for the brain to send the needed signal - the classic case is someone who’s very drunk or has taken a lot of depressive medication (such as narcotics) and who passes out and lies immobile in exactly the same position for hours, then wakes up to find one of their limbs is no longer working properly. It can also happen to a person who’s in a coma or under anaesthesia; medical personnel must pay close attention to the positioning of such patients to prevent that type of damage from occurring, since those patient’s aren’t capable of sensing that a problem’s developing and can’t “fidgit” the way a normally-sleeping person does.
Yes. I once woke up after a hard night of drinking unable to move my hand or wrist at all. I went to see the doctor and he told me I had what the French call “Lover’s Arm”-- nerve damage from applying pressure for too long/hard, in this case so as to not wake the entangled lover. Of course, in America it’s called “Saturday Night Palsy,” and in my case the term was more applicable. I was too drunk to heed the signal to get my head off my arm. I walked around for 3 months looking like I had cerebral palsy (well at least in my right hand). I couldn’t do a thing with it and my friends had a good laugh watching me try to use it. The doctor said that I could have conceivably permanently damaged my arm but that it was unlikely.
I woke up recently with this dead weight across my chest. “What’s that? What’s this big hairy thing on my chest? Oh my gosh it’s my arm!!!”. I couldn’t move it and had to grab it with the other arm to get it off. I was really freaking out, but after about 30 seconds everything was back to normal.
Whenever this happens, I sit up and shake my arm to restore circulation. Invariably, I shake too hard and my arm swings up and wacks me in the face. Talk about adding insult to injury.
I believe and arm or a leg “falling asleep” has nothing to do with blood circulation and everything to do with a nerve being pinched. Quagdop can confirm or rectify.
I was sleeping over at a friend’s house. I was just 12 or 13 at the time. I woke up from a dream and my arm was DEAD. I couldn’t feel anything in it, and it couldn’t move at all. It was very, very weird. After a minute or two it woke up. Whew!
I once slept face-down with my arms crossed under me; the result was two numb appendages that were completely useless when the telephone woke me up. I was unable to grasp the receiver with either hand, and only succeeded in knocking the phone to the floor as I battered it with two dead stumps.
Mostly what is being discussed here simply relates to a nerve being affected and the numb feeling you get when it’s compressed or pinched for a while.
There are some circulatory problems that can lead to different sensations in the limbs, but having an arm go numb while you sleep, or having a leg fall ‘asleep’ or go ‘pins and needles’ is usually from pressure on a nerve.
There does come a point when constantly applying pressure on one spot of the body (coma patients) becomes a health issue long term, but numb arms from sleeping are on a much different scale of seriousness.
Actually, continuous hard pressure on a nerve for just a couple of hours can cause permanent damage, and it does happen occasionally to sleepers (generally drunks or people who’ve passed out from narcotics abuse). It can also happen to surgical patients who are improperly positioned on an operating table for a few hours and subsequently have a foot drop from peroneal nerve damage or a limp arm from brachial plexus damage or ulnar nerve damage.
And significant impingment of blood circulation to a limb can also occur if the person lies on it in the right position for a long enough period of time (hours), and this can result in rhabdomyolysis (death of muscle tissue) and subsequent acute serious kidney problems.
Count these as yet more reasons why drinking until you pass out is a bad idea!
Did anyone read my post??
Yes; I didn’t cite it in my response to Philster only because you got damned lucky and didn’t wind up with permanent damage (which is what the OP was asking about). You easily could have; the reason it took 3 months for you to recover completely was because you’d basically killed off the nerve endings to your wrist and arm and the nerves had to re-grow them, and nerve axons grow incredibly slowly. Yours was the classic scenario in all other respects, in that it involved hard drinking, and the resulting central nervous system depression kept your body from responding to the nerve impingement by rollong over to free up your arm.
the thought of permanent damage freaks me out because I have been waking up with “dead arm” a lot recently…no drugs or alcohol required.
Don’t feel bad. I pepper all my posts with qualifying words such as ‘mostly’, ‘usually’, ‘often’, ‘frequently’ or ‘sometimes’…yet it doesn’t stop people from quoting me and then telling me that x,y and z really are possible. Do they read? I dunno.
Yeah… I know it CAN cause damage, which is why is my post says ‘mostly…some…usually…’
Cecil’s column on neurapraxia.
I’m sorry, but I almost spit my water all over the computer screen reading that. 
I’m sorry, I can’t stop laughing.
Just this morning I woke up to a senseless arm. I thought I’d experiment a bit and see how much fun I could have till it “woke up” again. I got out of bed and started swinging it around and spinning in circles. Too bad the fun only lasted about 10 seconds before all was back to normal.
Could have been worse. I did the same thing: woke up with two dead arms and the need to pee like a race horse. As luck would have it, my then-roommate had closed the bathroom door that morning on his way to work.
I know someone who this happened to.
And as mentioned, he was drunk at the time.
Came home wicked drunk, plunked down on his bed, which broke under is drunken weight, but he was asleep as soon as he hit the mattress, too drunk to be aware that the heavy footboard had fallen across his leg.
He was in hospital along time, had surgery, suffered months of excrutiating physiotherapy, wore a brace a long time, walked with a severe limp the rest of his life, and counted himself lucky he didn’t lose his leg.
Think about that the next time you stumble home blind drunk!
There are cases where people have lost part or all of their proprioception.
(proprioception is the body’s ability to know where its parts are. Sort of. If you close your eyes, most people can touch their nose. Proprioception is the mechanism that allows you to judge where your limbs are. In this case, it helps prevent you from smacking yourself in the nose. Its the body’s concept of what belongs to it. Very interesting stuff. Anyway…)
There have been various cases (a couple recounted in “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” by Oliver Sacks. (chapters 3 and 4, perhaps others)) where people have lost proprioception in either a limb or their entire body.
My understanding is these people wake up and their body doesn’t know it has a leg, for instance. In geeky computer terms, there’s no way to address /dev/leg because /dev/leg isn’t malfunctioning. It simply doesn’t exist. In some cases, this is caused by chemical imbalances (mega doses of vitamin B6), sometimes for unknown reasons. The ones on vitamin go back to normal once the level drops. Others lead a life attached to a limb their body isn’t aware of (in a way very different from an injury resulting in loss of feeling)
Some of these people have learned to move the limbs again, but only through concentration. They have to watch their feet to walk, their hand to grasp, etc.
Scary way to wake up.
in chaos,
pandamonium