I can just fine. I understand some people can’t. Can you?
I voted I can limp, but that isn’t precise. I walk, I fall, I stagger. I do soft tissue damage on my foot. Three years ago I did this, and ended up on crutches for a week. That foot still does not have the range of motion and strength the other one does.
I can walk oddly enough, but it’s very hard for me to getting up with one.
I can walk just fine. It’s obnoxious and the pins and needles feeling as the blood is coming back in is a bit more painful if I’m moving which makes me want to limp (and I will if I’m being lazy in an attempt to keep it somewhat immobilized) but I certainly can walk just fine.
Now, a handful of times in my life, 3 maybe, I’ve slept on my arm in such away that it was totally 100% numb in the morning. As in, it felt like I had a nerve block, you could have done surgery on it numb. When it was like that, I couldn’t move it at all. I had to physically use my other arm to pick it up and move it. It was very strange. If one of my legs did that, I wouldn’t be able to walk at all.
ETA, since it’ll probably make a difference, I’m 30.
No, I can’t. If I try, I will stagger about as if I’m drunk, crashing into furniture, and coming quite close to falling. When my leg is asleep, it is completely without feeling or coordination and will not support my weight at all. I have to sit and rub my leg until I get the feeling back into it. If it matters, I am diabetic and have circulatory problems in my feet and legs due to it.
You need an option for ‘it depends aka all of the above’.
I can walk just fine if it is starting to fall asleep, annoying and tingly but can be done. Just today I limped around the house until it woke up… but not until after I had stood leaning on a counter until I felt stable enough to walk.
The worst time I had been sitting on the ground and went to get up. Somehow I got enough momentum to stand up but had no stability whatsoever and landed right back on the ground because my leg just would not hold me.
I can walk when my leg is asleep.
My daughter cannot, as she very recently discovered.
She woke up yesterday morning, and her leg was asleep. She got up and tried to walk, anyway, and ended up flat on her face. When she fell, she banged up her knee, and we think she probably broke her pinky toe, too. I guess she somehow bent her toes backwards a good bit on the way down.
Another “it depends” here. It does very much depend on how asleep the leg is – it ranges from “a bit numb and tingly” to “utterly insensible and uncontrollable”.
In fact, I don’t think I would class the occasions when I can walk normally as the leg being properly “asleep” at all.
The worst thing, though is that I can frequently stand up and walk several steps before the numbness suddenly sets in – whereupon I either instantly join the Ministry of Silly Walks or become stranded in the middle of the room.
+1. When I was a kid I sometimes used to sit on my leg long enough to render it insensate. I did this deliberately just for the novelty of it; it was entertaining to temporarily “turn off” a limb like that. A total lack of sensation (no pins and needles at all) also came with a total lack of motor control; that leg was unable to bear weight, either walking or standing, until the blood flow had been restored long enough to reach a “pins and needles” stage.
So yeah, this whole thing depends on your definition of “asleep.”
Ditto for this, and if I reach the stage where I lose all feeling, the pins and needles afterwards are like torture. I once had a co-worker kick my leg while I was on the ground in such a state, and I wanted to wolverinize him.
Me too! In fact, just two days ago I stood up, walked across the room and then spent several minutes holding on to a wall to keep upright until the feeling came back into my leg. It’s not that the leg isn’t experiencing pins and needles before I stand up, it’s that it suddenly gets worse while I’m walking on it.
Yeah I definitely can still walk with a sleeping leg. I didn’t know there were people who couldn’t. What causes this inability, is it somatic or physiological? It never occurred to me that nerve conduction would be reliant on blood flowing normally in the leg.
Thanks to nerve damage from a back injury, my right leg is nearly always half asleep anyways and goes numb quite easily if I sit on it. I’ve gotten used to it, and can generally walk while it’s asleep.
In the same way that reduced blood flow impairs the functioning of sensory nerves, it also impairs the functioning of motor-control nerves.
If you are still able to walk with a “sleeping” leg, I suspect you haven’t pushed the phenomenon far enough. The next time you discover that one of your limbs has fallen asleep to the point that you are sensing “pins and needles,” maintain your position so as to continue restricting blood flow. You will eventually get to the point where the “pins and needles” sensation stops, and in fact you pretty much lose all sensation in the affected limb. When you get to the point where it’s utterly insensate, try walking on that; I suspect you’ll stumble and fall.
No. I sit on one leg most of the time when I’m on the computer, because I get tailbone pain if I don’t. My legs fall dead-asleep all the time. I try to rotate which one I sit on every half hour or so, but sometimes I get distracted on a long call and forget about it.
I didn’t answer because it depends. When it’s just asleep, I can walk but it feels unpleasant. When it’s more than asleep, I either can’t walk at all or I have to walk very very carefully. Being incautious while walking with very asleep legs/feet caused all but 1 of my many sprained ankles as a child.
I can walk fine, but I said limp as one time when I tried to do it, I fell.
I sort of drag the sleeping leg like a club. Usually, it’s just the foot that’s asleep.
I was once in a job interview where I was so intent on my conversation that I kept my legs crossed the same way throughout the entire hour long discussion. That time, the whole leg was asleep and no way could I even uncross it to stand up.
So I sort of pushed it off the other leg and kept asking question after question until some semblance of feeling returned. I got an offer. They thought I was really eager and very interested in the company due to the number of questions I’d asked. :rolleyes:
My right leg tends to fall asleep if I’ve spent too much time on the toilet, while doing crossword puzzles or sudokus. When I get up I can only hop around while holding on to things. Otherwise I’d fall.
I can walk just fine, but I discovered in college that there are limits. I was on the diving team and somehow managed to put a foot to sleep in between dives at a meet. It didn’t occur to me to ask for a minute to restore circulation. My foot and ankle just didn’t get the message to spring off the board in the standard fashion. It was not a good dive.