Peripheral Neuropathy: The Invisible Disability of Chemotherapy
Peripheral neuropathy: what the heck is that? Many medical journals and websites define peripheral neuropathy as:
A set of symptoms caused by damage to the nerves that are far away from the brain and spinal cord (often feet, legs, and hands) that carry sensations to the brain and control the movement of our arms and legs. Symptoms can include extreme shooting/stabbing pain, numbness/loss of feeling, tingling/electric shock feeling, muscle weakness, and balance issues.
One of the biggest causes for peripheral neuropathy? Chemotherapy! The harsh chemicals that are used to kill cancer cells unfortunately wreak a whole lot of other damage on the body along the way. Nerves, especially those that are far away from the brain, are some of the first to take blows. Certain chemotherapy drugs impact these nerves worse than others which is why everyone experiences such a variety of symptoms and severity.
So it’s no surprise that a staggering 30–40% of cancer patients treated with chemotherapy result in peripheral neuropathy. For some, it’s intense during treatment. Others experience it for a short period after chemo and it begins to improve. And others, like myself, end up facing the reality of a lifetime of permanent nerve damage.
That just sucks. It sucks so bad.
It sucks that these life saving drugs burn everything to shreds in their path. It sucks that hardly anyone knows what neuropathy is. It sucks that I constantly have to defend myself against handicap parking vigilantes to justify my invisible disability.
But if it’s the price I have to pay for being alive, I’d take it any day.
The downside is juggling this new found disability after treatment ends. As your life returns to normal, your body often struggles to keep up. Standing all day becomes not just a challenge but physical agony. Going back to work, school, and maintaining a busy schedule comes with a variety of chronic pain.
There are a ton of misconceptions and lack of information on what peripheral neuropathy is and why chemotherapy causes it. Not many people understand the extreme and debilitating pain it can cause. I’ve had pain so extreme it felt that my legs were being hit with electric shock treatments repeatedly until my bones cracked in half. That’s one way to explain it.
And that can be on a better day. On the worse days, the pain flip flops between numbness that gives me the balance of a drunk as I lose all feeling in my legs and feet.
And to add insult to injury, the nerve damage can be so great that it impacts the type of shoes you wear. Goodbye heels, tall boots, and most shoes that press tightly on my legs or sides of my feet. As a woman that owns over 30 pairs of shoes, it’s devastating to have my selection narrowed down so drastically. These are small things to some but to me it’s just another aspect of my identity cancer has taken from me.
As something that impacts so many of us cancer patients and survivors, there needs to be more information on this. More compassion, more empathy.
