Somatic Field Report #5. Filed with feet elevated, loading dock open.
by Jod(y)ie
Home from the trip of a lifetime, laundry mountain established, body presumably ready to resume normal operations.
Instead, on approximately night two, a sensation arrived that I can only describe as mail being delivered between my toes. Burning. Itching. A faint electric buzz in the one location on the human body specifically designed for nothing to ever happen there. Not the sole, where a sensible symptom would live. Not the ankle, which had at least held office recently. Between. The. Toes.
And here is the detail that mattered, though I didn’t know it yet: the sensation wouldn’t hold still. It floated. It migrated. One toe-gap tonight, a different one by morning, sometimes gone entirely, sometimes ringing three doorbells at once.
I did what any sensible person does. I misdiagnosed it immediately.
The Wrong Ticket
Location between toes plus itching equals fungus. Everyone knows this. The pharmacy knows this. So the antifungal spray was summoned, and it arrived the way all pest control arrives — confident, thorough, faintly chemical, absolutely certain it had the right address.
It sprayed. It re-sprayed. Days of diligent treatment.
Nothing. Not one percent of relief. The exterminator stood in an empty apartment, treating a tenant who had never lived there, while somewhere behind the walls, the actual occupant kept ringing doorbells.
Because a fungus stays put. A fungus signs a lease. This thing was itinerant. And an itch that ignores the obvious treatment isn’t a treatment failure — it’s a redirect. It’s the symptom clearing its throat and saying: wrong ticket. Read the delivery slip again.
Meanwhile, in the Mail Room
DISPATCH: (holding an envelope marked URGENT: SYSTEM RECOVERING — REDUCE LOAD) Alright, who’s running this upstairs?
MAIL ROOM: Can’t, boss. All primary channels are down. Skin’s still doing press cleanup from the hives edition. Gut just ended a work stoppage. Ankles are mid-liquidation.
DISPATCH: The big nerves?
MAIL ROOM: Jammed. Post-trip backlog. Six time zones of paperwork.
DISPATCH: (rubbing temples) So who’s left?
MAIL ROOM: (long pause) …The little guys. Small fibers. Night shift.
DISPATCH: And what route do they have?
MAIL ROOM: (quieter) Between the toes.
DISPATCH: Nobody checks between the toes!
MAIL ROOM: (slowly raising a laminated card) THE COURIER IS NOT THE MESSAGE. She’ll check. It’ll be weird enough that she has to check.
DISPATCH: (stamping the envelope) Fine. Send the bicycle.
And so, nightly, a very small courier on a very small bicycle pedaled the strangest route in the postal district, ringing doorbells in rotation, refusing to be signed for at any one address — because the message was never about the toes. The toes were just the last open road.
The Loading Dock
The delivery finally completed itself the day I put my feet up.
Elevation. That’s it. Feet above heart, gravity’s paperwork reversed, and the buzzing eased like a courier finally handing over the package and getting a signature. Which was, of course, the confirmation: fungus doesn’t care about altitude. Pressure and irritated small nerves care very much. The relief was the diagnosis.
And the package, once opened, said what it had been trying to say from the first doorbell: you asked a lot of me out there. I’m recovering. Reduce load. Put your feet up — no, literally.
The Part Where I Stop Kidding (Briefly)
Two lessons rode in on that little bicycle.
First: the address is not the message. Symptom location is where the mail got delivered, not what the letter says. The body sends its dispatches through whatever channel has capacity left — and after a big enough load, sometimes the only open route is the ridiculous one. Treating the address (spray the toes! blame the toes!) while the letter sits unread is how a body ends up over-treated and unheard at the same time.
Second, and bigger: hives, swollen ankles, a stomach in revolt, a seasick inner ear, and buzzing toes are not five diseases. They are one system, describing one load, in five departments’ handwriting. I spent the trip collecting what looked like a symptom anthology and came home with a single-author work. The differential that finally made everything make sense wasn’t “what’s wrong with each of these parts” — it was “what has the whole been carrying.”
Run the differential. Respect the redirect. And when the obvious treatment does nothing, don’t argue with the toes. Read the mail.
Filed with feet up. The courier has been tipped and released. The dog inspected the delivery site personally, as she does all incoming mail, and found it satisfactory.
Continue the Field Reports
This is part of the original Somatic Field Reports — a six-part season narrated from inside a body that runs its own curriculum. Each stands alone, but they build.
- Start here: My Gut Bacteria Are Better Somatic Practitioners — where the season opens.
- ← Previous: Unit: SKIN — The Department That Publishes
- Next →: An Organism Abroad
- Related: The Smoke Detector Is Not the Fire — on the difference between the alarm and the emergency.
Sources & lineage
The jokes are mine; the science underneath them is not. “The address is not the message” is, genuinely, one of the most important ideas in modern pain science.
- Moseley, G. L., & Butler, D. S. (2017). Explain Pain (2nd ed.). Noigroup Publications. Free resources at Tame the Beast. — Pain is an output about perceived load and safety, not a readout of damage at the delivery address. The whole post in one book.
- Moseley, G. L. (2007). Reconceptualising pain according to modern pain science. Physical Therapy Reviews, 12(3), 169–178. — Why the nervous system routes signals through whatever channel has capacity — and why the location misleads.
- Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. Norton. Available via the Polyvagal Institute. — For the load-and-recovery frame: the courier’s real message was “reduce load,” delivered by a system trying to protect you.
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