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I remember the exact day my neuropathy symptoms started...
The first time I felt neuropathy symptoms in a foot...
It was January 14th in 2014 and I was 30 years old. I came home from work on a rainy, cold, and wintery Monday. I work as a pharmacist and scientist at a hospital, so i mainly do office work.
When I took my winter boots off at home, I noticed that I had strange foot pain. The toes on my right foot felt strange; They kind of felt cold and numb, as if I had just done a long winter hike, but actually I had just come from the heated grocery shop and wasn't cold.
I didn't think too much of it, and thought it might just be a minor injury from the run I had been on the day before. I bandaged them up with some cold cream before I went to bed. The next day the symptoms pretty much stayed the same and I didn't think too much of it still.
Two days later both feet were in pain...
On Wednesday evening, I had made a plan to try an outdoor bootcamp sports lesson with a friend. I was kind of dreading it, as it was a freezing winter day, but since I had promised I would join I put on my running shoes and did an easy 15 minute run to get to the place to meet my friend.
The instructor made us do these incredibly exhausting exercises for about 30 minutes on some school playground out in the cold, and already after a few minutes of exercise, I noticed that my foot (the one with the affected toes) started tingling and went painful. It felt like when you get in from a day in the snow and your feet were really cold and then they start warming up, which can be really painful for a while.
This happened as I was doing my exercise outdoors, first in one foot and by the time we were finished, and I was heading home, it had also started in my other foot. I could not actually run home but had to walk with painful feet that felt like they had ants all over them and like I sharp gravel inside my shoes.
It felt as though I was trying to run home on a road of sharp gravel with bare feet....unfortunately I was no on my way to a nice day on the beach though.
The next day I developed hand pain too...
The next day when I got up I felt ok and went into work. I remember that I was wearing high heeled winter boots, and when we walked to the cafeteria at some point, I could feel that the forefoot of my right foot was sore to pressure and had weird electro-shock sensations when i put pressure on it. At that point I started to get worried about these symptoms that didn't seem to get better.
Later in the same afternoon I was working on my computer and I started to feel tingling in my right pinky, which spread over my whole right hand within about an hour. It was a cold January day and my office room was heated a fair bit.
I packed up, got my bike, and headed home. As I got into the cold and on my bike (with gloves) my hands felt better and I was a bit relieved. On the way home I decided to stop and grab a few things at the grocery shop. As I got into the heated shop from the cold I could feel how my feet and both my hands started to get tingly again and when I was at the cashier and entered my pin code to pay my finger tips were really sore to pressure and felt like they had a weird electric layer on them (it was definitely a feeling I had never felt before). At this moment, I definitely knew something was odd....
I started a frantic Google search...
...what do you do when something is odd....you start googling your symptoms....which is often a good but also a terrible idea, because odds are you are told you have brain cancer....
So far I had not told anyone about my symptoms, as I thought they were so bizarre and I hoped they would just disappear again. I had told my husband that my toes felt weird when it first occurred, but he just assumed that they got better again, as I had not mentioned them again.
I spent the next few days with frantic Google searches and I also started to search the medical literature - as I work as a scientist with access to many medical databases.....
But I just could not find anything that really explained my weird foot and hand pain (yet). A few days later we were sitting in front of the TV and I was kind of absently staring into my phone googling stuff.
My husband asked me what was going on and why I was so quiet (I am usually not a quiet person...), so I told him about all these weird symptoms that kind of made me freak out. He agreed that this did not sound like something we should ignore and he agreed to come with me to see a GP in the morning, as I was kind of freaking out a little at this point....
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