Learning about CIPN

I’ve been feeling real good lately.  My last few days have been filled with what I’m calling the “I’m back!” tour.  I’ve been popping in on friends and looking for opportunities to eat varied cuisines.  It’s all good, but one haunting little reminder of my recent chemo past has been numbness in my hands and feet.  It came on late in the chemotherapy and I just assumed that it would subside along with the other side effects.  But strangely it seems to be getting more pronounced.  My fingertip sensations are a bit dull but I notice it particularly in my feet as I am walking around more.  When I get in bed at night, it feels sort of like the sensation of how you feel after you walk around in the snow for a long time wearing improper shoes.  Except when I reach down to thaw out my toes, I realize that they are not really cold.

So this afternoon, my doctor’s office called to make sure I had received the info in the mail for my next CT scan. At the end of the call, I asked about the numbness and when I could expect it to go away.  The scheduler I was talking to, who is not a nurse, informed me that usually it does not go away.  She had a family member who has permanent numbness, which is a real drag, but at least it is better than the alternative of having thriving cancer cells.  She told me it is called neuropathy; more specifically, Chemotherapy-induced Peripheral Neuropathy or CIPN. 

I had to look it up on the Internet.  I learned that the symptoms tend to escalate for about 5 weeks after the chemotherapy is done (definitely my experience) and while often they will improve slightly, usually you are stuck with it for the foreseeable future.  The therapy to treat it is more about living with the symptoms and less about curing it.  One fortunate thing is that often it causes pain and in my situation, that does not seem to be the case.  It’s more like a moderate but omnipresent case of “pins and needles”.  It sometimes makes me walk funny (although I walk funny anyway) and occasionally stumble.  I’ve noticed that my clutch pedal technique has suffered a bit, as has my card-shuffling prowess.

I have to admit that this news has taken my current “high” down one notch.  I keep thinking that long hikes are probably out of the question and my fantasy about learning to play the guitar will likely remain a fantasy.  For the first time I’m feeling like maybe I really am receiving disability payments for a legitimate reason.  And then again, I have no pain, so this is really a mild case of a condition that others suffer greatly.  It’s just one more new normal.

Tonight I took Abby and Marlee to see the coming-of-age film, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”

It had pretty good ratings but since it was “teen” movie, I had low expectations.  As it turned out, I loved it!  Some pretty serious subject matter and plenty of very good acting.  There were some scenes of sex and drugs, which I'm sure made the girls uncomfortable to be sitting next to a parent.  But it also contained one of my very favorite film emotional flavors: sweetness.  It was a great palette-cleanser to the non-metaphorical hot pretzel with nacho cheese goo that the concessionaire at the theater talked me into due to its on-saleness to special customers like me.  Unfortunately, right now I can be talked into eating just about anything.