Numb Hands, Chest Pains

When I woke up this morning, I couldn’t feel my hands. They were numb and stiff -- the way your foot feels when it’s gone to sleep after you’ve sat on it for a long time. Except I’d slept flat on my back and not on my hands. I tried to wiggle them and after a few seconds, I was able to get a tingly sensation in the fingers, then the rest of the hands and finally, the tingling and numbness went away and my hands felt normal again. Maybe this is the neuropathy that chemo sometimes causes. But why’s it happening now, months after the chemo stopped?

Later on in the day, I began to feel sharp pains on the right side of my chest, deep inside, toward the back. I’m guessing it has to do with the radiation I got on that side. I wonder how long these side-effects last.

I suppose I should call my oncologist and tell her about these symptoms, but I keep getting these little quirky things from time to time and I can’t get into a panic each time it happens. But what if the cancer has spread to the lungs? I’m trying to remember whether I’ve had a chest X-ray recently to check the lungs and my chemo brain can’t even remember that.

It’s funny how I go from being super careful about every little thing that might be wrong in my body to just waving it away as another false alarm. I guess this is what living with cancer is about -- some days you have cancer and really feel it in your life, and other days, you just can’t be bothered even thinking about it.