...And sometimes that gets pretty annoying. So before anyone gets completely fed up with my Polly-Annaishness, I'll just report that I've just stubbed the snot out of my right toe. I smashed it into a step so hard I was afraid I might have broken it. It still moves, so obviously I haven't wrecked it yet. But this is all very worrisome.
And how did this happen? Well, it's because the numbness on my right side is worse. It's getting worse. I have no feeling at all from my right eye down my body to the end of my right foot. My right hand has no feeling, either--less than it had about a week ago.
I read online that "peripheral myopathy," as this seems to be called, is a pretty common side effect of chemotherapy. Possibly what I'm experiencing is due to that. A more likely culprit is my titration off the steroid that minimizes swelling--a temporary fix that did nothing to cure the underlying problem. So perhaps as they've reduced the steroid, I've begun to experience physically the real symptoms that were there all along.
In any event, I've only a week more of the treatments to go at this point, thank goodness, so perhaps this will begin to clear up afterward. But it's hard not to worry about that danged tumor again. After all, I've had some form of numbness since this ordeal began. I thought it was getting better for a while--and certainly everything else has improved. I can walk better than ever now (which means I'm not limping or stumping my right leg brutishly around as I was earlier), and I can do fairly precise yoga moves that require balance, and I can do some aerobic stuff like ride a recumbent bike. But this numbness bothers me, and more so now that it's getting worse.
Numbness and loss of sensation are tricky, though, from what I understand and from what I've learned from people who've experienced it. You can lose sensation for a lot of reasons--whacking your toe too hard against a step, for example!--or even from getting a touch of frostbite. Sometimes it will take months to come back--I've even experienced this myself once, though I can't remember now what triggered it. It was my pinky toe about twenty years ago, and I remember noticing one day that there was no feeling in it. Weird.
So I'm trying not to worry about this too much.
There's only one more week of the treatments to go, after all.
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2 comments:
If it's numb, does it hurt when you stub it? Maybe there's a benefit there! Or am _I_ being too PollyAnnish now?? I hope not.
kisses kisses kisses
Oddly, it does hurt when I stub it! It's only the surface that's numb. When they gave me a couple of shots, I most definitely felt them!
But it's not bothering me so much now as it was. The doctor confirmed that it's probably that I'm slowly going off the medications that addressed the symptoms. And since my muscle coordination is better, not worse, I figure that's the main thing.
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