Okay, this is a bit embarrassing, but I’m going to share this:

If you experience annoying phantom sensations or pain in missing toes or feet, try alternatively spraying very cold and very hot water on your bumhole in the shower.

Not so hot as to scald yourself obviously, but try as hot and as cold as you can bear without hurting yourself.

I know it sounds silly, but try it: it doesn’t cost anything and all you need is a shower with a detachable head.

Why did I even think of trying that in the first place you ask?

As you may know, I regularly get itchy phantom toes. It lasts for hours, sometimes days, it’s maddening and I can’t do anything about it.

When I do the shower thing, it wakes up my missing bits for a few seconds and I can feel the reverse temperature on them - i.e. cold water, hot toes and hot water, cold toes. By alternating the water temperature, I can “massage” my missing toes and work the itchiness away.

Why this happens may not be as random as you’d think.

I already knew I could weirdly feel my toes during prostate exams - which, ya know, if you’re a man of a certain age, is a humiliating thing you have to do every once in a while.

I wondered why. So I did a bit of research and I found this page: the cortical homonculus. It’s a map of the cortical areas of the brain dedicated to motor and sensory functions of different parts of the body.

And surprise-surprise, the areas that deal with the feet and toes and the genitals (which are kind of in the same general bum area) are adjacent:

Coincidence?

And then I remembered reading about hand-to-face remapping of tactile sensations in upper limb amputees in this research paper.

And sure enough, if you look at the homonculus, the areas for the hands and the face are next to each other.

This paper also suggests that when a limb goes missing, the areas of the brain that “go dark” are repurposed and “invaded” by functional areas nearby.

So in my case, it stood to reason that I could feel my missing bits by, erhm, stimulating my nethers.

I already knew sex doesn’t do it. So off I went to the shower to try stimulating something else in the vicinity (without doing anything I don’t really want to do for stimulation, if you catch my drift), and it worked rightaway with hot and cold water!

I’ve been doing this for a couple of weeks now and it’s totally repeatable. It gives me a degree of control over my issue without taking Gabapentin, without doing useless massages or spending hours in the sauna: when it hits, I’m not powerless and I can do something about it, and that’s a great relief!