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I drew a line on my leg with a marker to see if my nerve pain was moving. And it was. I'm 61. I spent twenty-four years standing in a school kitchen. Four hundred meals a day. So by the time I was 58 my right knee was finished and I had it replaced. The joint itself was a success, I'll say that. Six weeks in I was bending it further than they expected me to. For the first couple of weeks there was a patch below the knee with no feeling in it at all. I just put it down to the surgery and forgot about it. Then around week three it started to burn. That's what frightened me, because everything else was healing. The knee was better every single week, exactly the way they said it would be. But the burning was getting worse. By month four I couldn't have anything touching that patch. Not a bedsheet, not clothing, not even my own hand if I forgot. Over the year after that it spread. Not all over the leg, it went down the inside of my shin, to the ankle bone, and then the inner edge of my foot. A bit further each time. I'd stopped walking to the supermarket by then. When the pain caught me I'd lose my balance, and I was frightened of falling. I tried gabapentin, but it left me feeling hungover all morning and it barely touched the burning. Then a TENS machine, then lidocaine patches. Nothing lasted an hour. Every appointment with my surgeon I got the same sentence: it settles. It didn't settle. That's when I started drawing the line on it. I had to know whether I was imagining the whole thing. I wasn't. And I was scared. It took eighteen months to get from my knee to my foot, and I couldn't stop thinking about what another eighteen would look like. There are women in these groups who can't walk to the end of the road any more, who are in a wheelchair now. Nobody could tell me why that wasn't where I was going. By then I'd moved into my son's old room. I told my husband Jerry it was so he could get a proper night's sleep without me waking him up every couple of hours. But that wasn't the only reason. He'd rolled over one night, his leg touched mine, and I flinched hard enough to wake him up. He said sorry. I lay there in the dark thinking that if I stayed in that bed he would learn. He would start being careful with me. I was afraid of becoming a burden. Not his wife any more. But someone he had to look after. That's where I was when my son found a woman in a knee replacement group, 14 months out like me, who said a lotion called Brida had stopped the burning in her leg. There was ninety days money back on it if it did nothing, which is honestly the only reason I ordered. The first night, nothing at all. I nearly left it in the drawer. Then on the fourth night I woke up at 6:20 AM and I hadn't been up once. I checked the clock twice because I did not believe it. Eighteen months I had not slept through a night, not one. There I was lying in the dark wondering what was wrong, because nothing had woken me. I got out of bed and went to wake Jerry. Six in the morning. He must have thought I'd lost it. By the end of that first week I was getting five or six hours a night. I kept waiting for it to stop working, because everything else had. It didn't stop. By the second week I pulled the sheet up over that leg on purpose, just to see. Braced for it. It just felt like a sheet. I just stayed like that, covers over both legs like anybody else in the world, with tears in my eyes. A year and a half I'd gone without that. That was seven months ago now, and I've used it morning and night ever since. The burning is gone. I can have a bedsheet on that leg, clothing on it, my own hand flat on it, and none of it hurts. It's still a bit numb and I don't think that's ever coming back fully, but I've made my peace with that. I haven't drawn a line on that leg in months. I don't think about it any more, and that's the part I still can't get over. For all that time that leg was the first thing in my head when I woke up and the last thing before I went to sleep. Now it's just a leg. The night I moved back into our room, Jerry didn't say anything. He just moved over. I lay there and cried, to be honest with you. If your burning is still just at the knee, so was mine. Eighteen months later it was in my foot and I'd stopped walking to the shops. Please don't give it that long. This is the lotion I use if you want to check it out: www.bridarelief.com/pages/real-relief