For the first few weeks, I could barely sleep. Over the following months, I lost weight — almost a pound a week. I couldn’t drive, or cook, or use my laptop for work, or even hold a book or a pen. I would have been bored, except the pain was so tiring that I could barely function. I spent the days shuffling around the house listening to audiobooks and doing voice-to-text searches for “nerve pain arms” with my phone flat on the table, then carefully, painfully, scrolling through the results.