A thorn in my flesh

I've had this thorn in my flesh since I can remember, but it gets worse as I get older. I suffer from restless legs: an incontrollable urge to move my legs, as soon as I sit or lie down to relax. It is not really painful, but very irritating and uncomfortable. Attacks mostly occur in the evening, but I sometimes have them even early in the afternoon and they are worse when I am tired and desperately want to rest.





I have tried various remedies through the years. Long ago mild painkillers were enough and I used to drink paracetomol before we went to the movies for "just in case." Later on I started taking Rivotril - a drug for epilepsy, but it mostly just made me very sleepy. For years I slept well, but the restless legs attacks kept coming.





I started taking Pexola , a drug for Parkison's Disease, but soon had to increase the dosage - and still found that it wasn't 100% effective. I was really getting worried - how bad was it going to be in future? My grandmother and my mother also suffered from it. My mother had a particularly bad attack the morning before her death - I helped to walk for a little because movement relieves it a bit, but it returns as soon as you sit down again.





I searched the internet and found that an iron shortage is one reason. I started taking some of Jan's iron pills and immediately had a big relief, but this too did not last long. (I am thankful though that it helped me on the Russian tour and I had no restless legs - even on the aeroplane!) I searched the internet again and bought e-books. The one suggested that salt is the cause: this could be true, because I used to use a lot of salt and loved smoked, salty food like ham and bacon, not too mention biltong.





No salt was almost like a death sentence to me, but I found ways to make food palatable without lots of salt: real mayonnaise has little salt,(much less than light salad cream0, real cream cheese and some low fat cottage cheeses have low sodium content, and Black Cat peanut butter is also on the list of may-haves. Tuna is fish oil is OK, but not tuna in brine water. (Most of my food choices nowadays are low in salt, still tasty but fattening!) I find myself looking at rice cakes and corn cakes: the ones without salt have more kilojoules than the ones with salt added...! Which should I buy? I buy both kinds and resolve to eat one of each instead of two of the same packet and so hope to balance too much salt and restless legs versus getting fat! (Bread and margarine, by the ways are no-no's)





Another ebook suggested this was all nonsense - one needs salt. According to this book the cause of restless legs is a bladder that is not emptied completely. So now when restless legs start, I go to the toilet, drink extra magnesium... and then drink Pexola anyway.... but at least I am down to one Pexola a day!





Ah well... (What a boring post - but just had to get it off my chest! Maybe someone knows of a better way to deal with this thorn in the flesh?)





P.S. Another thorn - not in the flesh, but still. I found in previous posts, that the spaces I put in between paragraphs disappear when the post is published. This time I put in extra spaces, in case you wonder why the spaces are so big... or in case there are no spaces again. And does anyone know how I can change the font of my heading and blog description? One can barely read it now.