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pain in left leg muscle below knee
I experience pain in my left leg muscle below the knee and above the ankle, mainly the outer part of the leg. It hurts most at night and wake me up constantly. This is not a pain I experience everyday but lately it seems to have gotten worse and happen more frequently. I had test done for blood clot and everything was ok. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia a few years ago and was wondering if this could possibly be one of the symptoms.
Hi Stephanie I am also facing exactly same problem pain below knee back of left leg only. Especially after just laid down at the time of sleep, I don't know why it is in left leg calf only. After massaging it feels little bit relax as well using spray pain killer got some kind of relax. I request you if you got rid of your same problem kindly advice on the same what u did for it asap.
Thanks.
Anand
Thanks.
Anand
2 Comments
Have you had any relief at all Anand. Your symptoms are same as mine. I have had little or no good sleep for almost 2 years as pain is worse at night. Have thrown hundreds of dollars at the problem with no relief in sight.
Hi Yoda341. You don't say your age. I have a question for you which is have you looked into peripheral artery disease? Leg pain at night can be due to vascular diseases such as peripheral artery disease. Do you have any swelling? Here is some info on PAD. Give it a read and let me know what you think. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/peripheral-artery-disease/symptoms-causes/syc-20350557
I am a 20 year old female. I have been experiencing some sharp pains in my left leg right below the knee. What could be the cause of that. Could I possibly have RLS? Or is it something else. It mostly happens at night when I am about to lay down for bed and it sometimes happens when I am in the car. This pain is killing me! What can I do?
I'm getting a similar set of pains under my knee in my calf along with other calf cramping, foot cramping, tight Achilles tendon and thigh and pain near or at the Piriformis muscle with some slight odd feeling at the bass of the spine once in awhile. It seems similar to Sciatica in that it follows many of the nerve pathways, but I don't get numbness or shooting pains and rarely sharp pains. I get mostly what feels like cramping and dull aching pains, although I don't see much in the way of spasms or other indications of actual cramps. I just had lumbar spine and pelvis X-Rays (MRI would be next to look for a slipped or bulging disc; herniated seems unlikely given the leg lift tests fail to show results; Piriformis muscles are no longer tight after over a month of stretches and yet the problems continue. Achilles tendon stretches seem to have calmed the calf cramping to much lower levels, although they still occur. The calf muscles kind of look like they're slowly getting larger (less fat, more muscle despite little in the way of leg workouts).
I recently had shoulder surgery to deal with another problem I was having over the winter. I seemed to pull a tendon in my right arm and that seemed to trigger some kind of neuropathy-like reaction in the region. I started having pains down both arms to my forearms and for a couple of months I had extreme skin sensitivity near my right pectoral muscles. Two bone spurs showed up on X-rays of my right shoulder (little on the left), but the other weird symptoms made them want to wait and see before trying to remove them. A couple of months later after more misery a 2nd "test" cortisone shot reduced most of the pain and most of the symptoms. Massage therapy seemed to help with forearm and other sensitivity issues. I had the bone spurs removed and all symptoms (other than tightness/ache issues as a result of surgery recovery) disappeared. Looking back, I think I was tightening my neck muscles (already have a weak disc that can bulge if it gets compressed in C4 there that has caused intermittent pain behind my left scapula over the past few years and even finding THAT much out took years). But I think there was a real pain being caused by the bone spurs catching (felt like somethign catching on something sharp and after the surgery that is exactly where the post-surgical pain was; all motions that caused pain before like lifting the arm to shift the manual gear lever disappeared after the surgery once I got some strength back).
But before I even got to that surgery, I started having leg/sciatica like symptoms when I started recording music this past July in my new home studio setup. The Macintosh laptop was set up on the top of the piano and it's not the most ergonomic position looking back and my phsyical therapist seems to think that probably nudged a disc in my back into bulging against the back of the nerve slightly, thus setting off motor neuron reactions that are causing the cramping along the nerve (lack of tingling and numbness would be because only the motor neurons are being affected by the bulge due to where it's touching or the angle or whatever). Both legs are affected, though. It went away for a few days after the surgery (anesthetic seemed to knock it out, leading me to think it was the Piriformis muscles, but those stretches don't seem to help much). So now I'm doing upper body stretches (push up under shoulders with legs staying down) every two hours for a week to see if it helps any. I have an inversion table also, but it hasn't seemed to help much in that area (fixed another minor back pain that only occurred after laying in bed for over 5 hours, though very quickly, probably a vertebrae out of position. Going to a chiropractor on and off for years never fixed it, so I'm against chiropractors at this point. I think they may cause more problems than they solve. It did help with the neck crick I got after too much weight lifting during PT for the shoulder the first time before surgery, though. Most of the time, I can get it back into place myself with a neck motion, though.
As you can see, I've been having a bad year. It's almost like a neuropathy started as a result of the bone spur/tendon pull and traveled downward, but it's probably a coincidence. There is a possibility it's an auto-immune reaction, though given the strangeness of it all. I did have a semi-high ANA blood count (auto-immune anti-body count), but arthritis center in Akron, OH claimed it wasn't high enough to trigger their own tests and did some more to check for specific auto-immune diseases and they all came back negative. When the doctor removed the bone spurs from my right shoulder, there was no signs of arthritis in the joins or surrounding areas, just the "V" shaped one that showed up on X-Rays which may have been from repetitive motion of some type. So I don't know what to think at this point. I've been severely depressed more than once during this mess (anti-depressants made the skin sensitivity worse and did little else, especially Zoloft), but the shoulder pain is pretty much gone now and if I could get rid of this leg pain problem, I'd feel pretty good so I keep holding in there. Lyrica has had no noticeable affect on either condition. Sitting on hard surfaces tends to make it worse, although it also depends on where the chair contacts the leg, among other things. A sofa or recliner feels almost normal. It's very frustrating. Stretches have little effect on the overall condition, although they do seem to help localized symptoms. Fibromyalgia isn't suspected because the problem is only along the route of the sciatic nerve and before that limited to the shoulder/arm region with no leg symptoms for 6 months (and now no shoulder or arm symptoms).
I just had a pain in my left calf, but upons massaging the area, it was obvious that it was actually under my left knee and referring into the calf. Similarly, pains in my calf also appear to come from my feet. Achilles stretches and new orthotics for my shoes have helped as well, although I never had any foot pain (and all knee pain disappeared) since using Dr. Schools normal gel pads for the past 5 years. The new ones are the machine recommended custom orthotics by Dr. Scholls. They have much more heel cushion and correct the flat arches in my feet. But the thigh symptoms continue and some calf pain persists. Foot pain is down, however. I'm also taking 500mg Naproxin for 10 days and just finished a Predisone 6-day pack before that (had some positive effect, but didn't eliminate it so they want to try longer term anti-inflammatories along with the physical therapy now. They'll tell me the X-Ray results at the next visit (unless it's major; they'd call me they said) and from there possibly an MRI to see if a disc is out of place. The phsycial therapist thinks so, though from the push-up test (never had any reaction before at home, but I wasn't putting my arms right under my shoulders, which lifts me up a lot further and compresses the lower spine more, which did reproduce some symptoms so a disc bulge seems likely at this point. She thinks my recording with a lot of reaching and leaning (which the laptop being at an un-ergonomic location) may have nudged it out of position slightly.
Maybe some of this information might help some of you look in new directions. Calf and thigh pain and/or cramps appears to usually be caused by some kind of nerve pinch, touch or entrapment somewhere along the line.
I recently had shoulder surgery to deal with another problem I was having over the winter. I seemed to pull a tendon in my right arm and that seemed to trigger some kind of neuropathy-like reaction in the region. I started having pains down both arms to my forearms and for a couple of months I had extreme skin sensitivity near my right pectoral muscles. Two bone spurs showed up on X-rays of my right shoulder (little on the left), but the other weird symptoms made them want to wait and see before trying to remove them. A couple of months later after more misery a 2nd "test" cortisone shot reduced most of the pain and most of the symptoms. Massage therapy seemed to help with forearm and other sensitivity issues. I had the bone spurs removed and all symptoms (other than tightness/ache issues as a result of surgery recovery) disappeared. Looking back, I think I was tightening my neck muscles (already have a weak disc that can bulge if it gets compressed in C4 there that has caused intermittent pain behind my left scapula over the past few years and even finding THAT much out took years). But I think there was a real pain being caused by the bone spurs catching (felt like somethign catching on something sharp and after the surgery that is exactly where the post-surgical pain was; all motions that caused pain before like lifting the arm to shift the manual gear lever disappeared after the surgery once I got some strength back).
But before I even got to that surgery, I started having leg/sciatica like symptoms when I started recording music this past July in my new home studio setup. The Macintosh laptop was set up on the top of the piano and it's not the most ergonomic position looking back and my phsyical therapist seems to think that probably nudged a disc in my back into bulging against the back of the nerve slightly, thus setting off motor neuron reactions that are causing the cramping along the nerve (lack of tingling and numbness would be because only the motor neurons are being affected by the bulge due to where it's touching or the angle or whatever). Both legs are affected, though. It went away for a few days after the surgery (anesthetic seemed to knock it out, leading me to think it was the Piriformis muscles, but those stretches don't seem to help much). So now I'm doing upper body stretches (push up under shoulders with legs staying down) every two hours for a week to see if it helps any. I have an inversion table also, but it hasn't seemed to help much in that area (fixed another minor back pain that only occurred after laying in bed for over 5 hours, though very quickly, probably a vertebrae out of position. Going to a chiropractor on and off for years never fixed it, so I'm against chiropractors at this point. I think they may cause more problems than they solve. It did help with the neck crick I got after too much weight lifting during PT for the shoulder the first time before surgery, though. Most of the time, I can get it back into place myself with a neck motion, though.
As you can see, I've been having a bad year. It's almost like a neuropathy started as a result of the bone spur/tendon pull and traveled downward, but it's probably a coincidence. There is a possibility it's an auto-immune reaction, though given the strangeness of it all. I did have a semi-high ANA blood count (auto-immune anti-body count), but arthritis center in Akron, OH claimed it wasn't high enough to trigger their own tests and did some more to check for specific auto-immune diseases and they all came back negative. When the doctor removed the bone spurs from my right shoulder, there was no signs of arthritis in the joins or surrounding areas, just the "V" shaped one that showed up on X-Rays which may have been from repetitive motion of some type. So I don't know what to think at this point. I've been severely depressed more than once during this mess (anti-depressants made the skin sensitivity worse and did little else, especially Zoloft), but the shoulder pain is pretty much gone now and if I could get rid of this leg pain problem, I'd feel pretty good so I keep holding in there. Lyrica has had no noticeable affect on either condition. Sitting on hard surfaces tends to make it worse, although it also depends on where the chair contacts the leg, among other things. A sofa or recliner feels almost normal. It's very frustrating. Stretches have little effect on the overall condition, although they do seem to help localized symptoms. Fibromyalgia isn't suspected because the problem is only along the route of the sciatic nerve and before that limited to the shoulder/arm region with no leg symptoms for 6 months (and now no shoulder or arm symptoms).
I just had a pain in my left calf, but upons massaging the area, it was obvious that it was actually under my left knee and referring into the calf. Similarly, pains in my calf also appear to come from my feet. Achilles stretches and new orthotics for my shoes have helped as well, although I never had any foot pain (and all knee pain disappeared) since using Dr. Schools normal gel pads for the past 5 years. The new ones are the machine recommended custom orthotics by Dr. Scholls. They have much more heel cushion and correct the flat arches in my feet. But the thigh symptoms continue and some calf pain persists. Foot pain is down, however. I'm also taking 500mg Naproxin for 10 days and just finished a Predisone 6-day pack before that (had some positive effect, but didn't eliminate it so they want to try longer term anti-inflammatories along with the physical therapy now. They'll tell me the X-Ray results at the next visit (unless it's major; they'd call me they said) and from there possibly an MRI to see if a disc is out of place. The phsycial therapist thinks so, though from the push-up test (never had any reaction before at home, but I wasn't putting my arms right under my shoulders, which lifts me up a lot further and compresses the lower spine more, which did reproduce some symptoms so a disc bulge seems likely at this point. She thinks my recording with a lot of reaching and leaning (which the laptop being at an un-ergonomic location) may have nudged it out of position slightly.
Maybe some of this information might help some of you look in new directions. Calf and thigh pain and/or cramps appears to usually be caused by some kind of nerve pinch, touch or entrapment somewhere along the line.
I've been treated for RLS for years. Requip does keep it under control. Recently I've had just severe pain in right leg below the knee; seems to be on the outside of the shin & in the foot. I can't even move my foot when this happens, almost immmoobilized. Right now I take gabapentine (sp?)... so far so good.
wow! finally a bunch of people that have explained the exact pain i have. ITS SOO SORE!. below my knee on the left leg is a numbing pain that i have had for about a year now. although nothing seems to relieve the pain as its in such a weird spot. i have been too busy to see a physio due to my sport although have found that using a rolling pin to massage my calf and thigh often temporarily gets rid of the pain at the front of the leg.
good luck, let me know any suggestions :)
good luck, let me know any suggestions :)
I too have been experiencing in my left upper leg, right below the knee. Doctor believes this is "referred pain." He put me on the 6 day steroid pack and I'm to have an x-ray if the pack does not alleviate the pain. It's been going on for two weeks and the pain is occurring more often now. Most of the time, upon rising , I can't even stand upright, although, the pain only lasts two or three minutes.
I am having the same thing! I have been send for back x-ray, then ultrasounds of my left leg, then MRI of my lower back and left knee and just this past Friday for MRI of my lower left leg! The last was to rule out a lesion. I have no swelling. I also have pain walking up steps or inclines but that is not always present. RLS was mentioned early on but that also was ruled out. Sometimes the pain is not there when I recline or lie down....then I realize how uncomfortable I have been. It does wake me up at night and is relieved if I get up.
would like to hear back from you! Joanne
would like to hear back from you! Joanne
Yes, Fibromyalgia can cause severe leg pain. Also you may want to ask about the possibility of RLS (Restless Leg Syndrome) which is a newly discovered condition that is treatable, but your symptoms sound very much like RLS.
Get in touch with the doc that diagnosed the Fibromyalgia and let him/her know about the problems you are currently having. Best to take care of it now before it gets worse.
Good Luck!
--J
Get in touch with the doc that diagnosed the Fibromyalgia and let him/her know about the problems you are currently having. Best to take care of it now before it gets worse.
Good Luck!
--J
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