system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is it possible to permanently damage or kill one of your limbs by sleeping on it incorrectly?

Everyone has woken up after falling asleep in a strange position only to find that their leg(s) or arm(s) is tingling and they have trouble moving it for a while until the blood flow in the limb gets back to normal. Sometimes this happens when one is awake and they can quickly shake their limb around to normalize it, while other times it becomes so extreme that one is not able to stand, walk, and/or lift their arm at all until the blood flow gets back to normal. What I'm curious about is, is it possible to cut off circulation to a limb so extremely that the limb suffers permanent damage or one loses complete function of the limb? Does our body have a mechanism to prevent this if we sleep on a limb incorrectly for a long time or is it simply impossible for one to "kill" one of their limbs with their own body weight? If this is possible, has it ever happened before?
gpt
Yes, there are a few ways you can do this.

You can stretch or compress a nerve. This normally will just cause pins and needles and feeling of numbness, but there is a medical phenomenon know as "Saturday night palsy" , where you come home drunk, throw your arm over the chair and fall asleep. Youre too drunk to notice the pain and you essentially just impinge/stretch your brachial plexus nerves. The next day you cant move it. Usually recovers, but if it was severe enough, might not.

I had a patient last year who took a load of heroin and passed out for 30 hours or so lying on his leg. He suffered a reperfusion injury and developed acute kidney injury and needed surgical debridement of dead tissue on his shin. If it had been worse, he could have lost that.

Our bodies normally feel pain however, so these situations shouldnt happen to normal folks.