Managing Peripheral Neuropathy

One of the worst symptoms of certain chemotherapies, especially vinblastine, vincristine and Brentuximab is Peripheral Neuropathy. To describe it in my case it feels in your fingers like the sensation when you go to the dentist and get an injection and when your mouth starts to get the feeling back in your lip, its like that at the ends of you fingers, in particular the thumb, forefinger and index finger (linked to the Median Nerve).

With your feet, in my case it is worse walking on hard surfaces like stone or concrete. The sensation is hypersensitivity so its hard to walk as its a kind of pressure soreness I feel.

I had the most unbelievable nerve pain below the waste, about a 6"-8" patch in my groin that was like having severe sunburn. It was painful to touch and wear jeans but no visible rash or anything to show for it. No pain killers like Neurofen helped at all. So looking into it I found it was Neuropathic pain otherwise known as Neuralgia. This is linked to the PN.

It helps being hydrated. Alcohol makes it worse and getting your salt : water balance wrong makes it worse. Also your B vitamins need to be as high as possible as they maintain nerves; in particularly B6 and B12.

Treatments for PN are a bone of great contention and some work for some people and not for others.

Acupuncture can work and potentially can exacerbate it, so its one to try with some caution. Not incredibly worse just slightly worsen in my case and only temporarily. I'm not sure the Chinese approach to PN works too well, but western methods I have heard can work well.

I found some light relief but by no means complete, but relief using Calamine D cream on the area. It just calmed it down a bit, i took pain medication and 10mg of Phenegan to sleep which I was able to do.

My private GP told me about Duloxetene, which actually is a tricyclic antidepressant but can work incredibly well against Peripheral Neuropathy caused by Chemotherapy. 60mg daily is the dose I am on and it started working incredibly quickly though of course not without its own side effects. In my case nausea. So the doctors suggested I double the dose of anti-emetics - Metoclopromide, in my case.

So managing this beast for me is quite key as I need the higher dose of Chemo (Brentuximab) to make sure we get on top of the cancer and manage the PN and nausea symptoms so I can.

I would be interesting to know what solutions you have found to help you so we can make suggestions for other to try.