While hooking up my television I somehow managed to fall asleep face down on the floor with my arms tucked underneath me. When I awoke I instantly realized something was wrong. My arms had fallen asleep but it wasn’t the normal fallen asleep we associate with pins and needles. No, my arms where Christopher Reeves paralyzed.
Considering I was still in a fog I just dismissed the total loss of feeling in my arms. But once the fog cleared the gravity of my situation griped me and tossed me into a state of panic. Had the television fallen on me and landed on my spine or was I suffering from some rare spontaneous arm paralyzing disease?
I rolled on to my back and using my legs pushed myself up against a wall and on to my feet. My arms dangled lifelessly as I pondered my next steps. What do I do? Who can I call? How would I call?
My arms dangled limply for five minutes when I felt the agonizing, yet oddly comforting feeling of pins and needles. My neurons began firing, carrying the electrochemical impulses along the nerve pathways to my brain.
I tried to go back to sleep but for an hour I laid in bed thinking about the inherit dangers of living alone. Stories I had read or heard on the news of people found face down in a plate of food, choked to death by a fish bone ran through my mind. The grim truth that they were only discovered by accident due to the foul smell rattled me.
Eventually my mind wondered off and my eyelids grew heavy.
Note: The medical term for limbs falling asleep is Transient Paresthesia.