Post-Transplant Peripheral Neuropathy (update)

Both my parents and my sister asked me whether the kidney transplant fixed the pain in my feet. The answer is a resounding no.

I have had pain from peripheral neuropathy before I found out about my kidney failure. My understanding is that the numbness comes from damaged or dead nerves caused by uncontrolled diabetes, and essentially there is no cure. I was lucky that I did not experience much neuropathy during my hospital stay, or even the first few weeks of recovery. However, neuropathy pain from last night and tonight have been pretty intense, and is preventing me from sleeping right now even though it is 2:00 am.

Last night, the pain was pretty high up on the outside of my left ankle. I have never experienced pain there before. Since it was kind of high up on my lower leg, I could apply pressure to the pain point and actually feel something, usually more pain. This was different than all the previous pain points where I could not feel any external pressure on the pain point. Tonight, the pain is in the same area but a bit lower. Like last night, I could push on the area and manually trigger the pain. I tried using a massage wand on the spot, but that just made it worse. The Tylenol I took has not helped yet so it looks like it will be a long night of pain attacks. I also had some sporadic pain in my right foot from neuropathy, but the entire lower from the knee down is still hurting from the fall I took at UCLA. The pain in my right leg gets a lot worse after 15 minutes of walking so I have only walked every other day recently. The nurse practitioner at UCLA said it may take 4-6 weeks to heal from a fall to the kneecap so I may have to limp around for another three weeks.

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Update: 2/26/2021 9:04 pm

So all the pain attacks have pretty much stopped for the moment. It was pretty bad yesterday while driving home from UCLA after my clinic appointment. In the hour drive home, I had three places on my left foot experience shooting pain, and one place on my right foot. Usually, the pain is limited to one location at at time, but this time, the pain was pretty much constant with four different locations hurting at random.

Of course I rather have the kidney transplant than to go back to the way things were but this multiple pain points at the same time is killing me. Good thing most of the pain was in my left foot, which is not used when driving.