My physical therapist called on Monday about scheduling a virtual appointment, but she called my cell phone, which I don't always keep at arm's length, so I missed the call.
I called the Cancer Center on Wednesday, and the scheduler said the physical therapist is doing both virtual and in-person visits. But she's not seeing patients on Fridays, the day I usually go in for treatments. I'm still wary when it comes to the coronavirus, plus I figured, I don't have any urgent concerns, so I decided to schedule a virtual visit.
The virtual appointment was today, and we spoke on the phone for 30 minutes. I told her about my current baseline: I wear wrist braces to sleep every night, and my thumb, pointer, and middle fingers are mildly numb and tingly all the time, but don't disrupt my daily activities. I also described the painful flare-ups that led me to take a break from basically everything.
She asked me a bunch of questions along the lines of: Am I getting headaches? Do I have any pain in my shoulders? Do my arms feel tired? Do I have symptoms in my legs or feet?
After all that, she was very confident in saying that she would like me to get an MRI. She said that symptoms that are side effects of medication usually do not change with a person's activities, so the fact that lying down on my back seems to be a trigger for making numbness and tingling worse is an indication of a non-medication-related problem. (My medical oncologist said the same when she first proposed the MRI.) She also thought that the symmetry of my symptoms, and the existence of some numbness and tingling in my toes, suggested something going on in my neck. If we had had an in-person visit, she would have performed some physical tests on my neck, and even then, she still would have wanted an MRI so that we could have all the pieces of the puzzle. Ideally, an MRI will either confirm or rule out a neck problem.
As for why I might be experiencing neck problems, she explained how my double mastectomy resulted in major changes to my chest wall that ultimately affected my chest, shoulder, and neck muscles, which are all interconnected.
I told her how I had been leaning towards not getting an MRI until after my Herceptin treatment ends, in case Herceptin is causing some of the symptoms, but she said not to wait. If the problem is not Herceptin, the sooner it's treated the better; if the problem is nerve-related, letting it go unaddressed now might make it harder to treat later.
She said she would email my medical team about scheduling me for an MRI. Then I can schedule an in-person appointment with her after we have the MRI results.
As always, I really appreciated my physical therapist's insights. Getting her professional opinion felt very reassuring.
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