5/17/20: Maybe Herceptin is Causing Carpal Tunnel Syndrome?

I'm still pushing through with side effects. It's been very frustrating and discouraging, but today, in one of the Facebook support pages, I came across a post that tied carpal tunnel syndrome to Herceptin.

This wasn't a connection I made before, even though "numbness or tingling in the hands, feet" is listed as a side effect for Herceptin. (I do also sometimes feel tingling in my toes, particularly when lying down on my back or sitting in a reclined position.) I think I didn't associate the numbness and tingling with Herceptin because those side effects started over 3 months after I started Herceptin, but it's only now that I've realized that the timing coincided with when I started the larger, 3-week dose of Herceptin! How did I miss that!?

Wearing wrist braces to sleep seems to be an effective piece of managing my symptoms, so it feels more and more like carpal tunnel syndrome is part of what's going on.

None of the formal-looking lists I found for Herceptin side effects named carpal tunnel syndrome specifically, but a Google search returned a handful of less official-looking pages that linked the two. My oncologist did mention carpal tunnel at the appointment when I first reported the numbness and tingling in my hands, but she didn't suggest it was because of Herceptin. Maybe she made the connection in her head. I wondered at the time why I would suddenly have carpal tunnel syndrome.  

Anyway, it's remarkable how a bit of hope can change one's attitude. As if life during a global pandemic isn't hard enough, every day I spend a significant amount of mental and physical energy trying to manage my symptoms. It's disheartening to think about living with these symptoms forever, or for as long as I'm taking Lupron (which is presumably until I reach natural menopause, or decide to remove my ovaries, which would come with its own set of side effects). My numb and tingly hands may or may not be caused by Herceptin, but just having the hope that they might go away when my Herceptin treatments end helps me to stay positive and optimistic.