Experiencing Neuropathy

When Touch Changes

What happens when we lose the ability to feel? It’s like losing part of our ability to see.

Photo of author’s hand and knitted scarf (photo by author)

We think that we navigate our environment by sight, but we don’t realise how much we rely on our sense of touch to experience the world.

One day my fingers felt like I had dipped them in glue. As if I had been fixing something and some of the glue stuck to my finger tips and dried. Except my hands were clean.

It was the beginning of neuropathy. I was six months in on my chemotherapy treatments, and the neuropathy was unexpected. At first it was annoying, then it became more concerning. I thought it was because I was taking some heavy-duty antibiotics for an infection that was unrelated to the breast cancer that I was being treated for. I thought that after I’d finished the antibiotics that it would disappear. Instead, it intensified and then my toes joined in.

At first it was just dullness, like there was a barrier between my fingertips and the outside world. After about a week I started to get the feeling like my fingers had “gone to sleep”. That tingling sensation when sleeping in an awkward position and the blood flow is blocked. But…