Joe’s Story

After chemotherapy, Joe’s foot turned black for six months, and he lost three toes to amputation. Peripheral neuropathy affects 30-40% of chemotherapy patients and is a frequent side effect of neurotoxic chemotherapy drugs.

Joe: My doctor told me my chemo regimen would be really bad… It devasted my body and my foot. After a couple of years of taking Neurontin, it stopped working, and I started having major pain issues.

Q. What other symptoms do you have?
Joe: I had all the symptoms of neuropathy… I have sharp pain, cold, hot, you know – buzz, the whole thing. But mostly, it is an absolute bad pain.

Q. How did the symptoms impact your daily life?
Joe: Severely. Even though I was on high-dose medication, I still had a lot of breakthrough pain, which I could also take breakthrough medication for, but I’d be loopy half the time.

Q. How long ago did you start the treatments at RealWave?
Joe: I’m on week 11.

Q. So you’ve also been able to get off some of your medications?
Joe: I’m off all of them. After four sessions… we did stop taking my morning narcotics to see how it went, and miraculously, I had no pain at all. The only problem I had was withdrawal. It had nothing to do with my neuropathy issues, just withdrawal from narcotics. And then, I stopped my evening meds, and that was on day 19.

Q. So, what is your pain level now?
Joe: No pain.

Q. What can you do now that you couldn’t do before you started the treatments?
Joe: I can actually run… I couldn’t run before.

Q. How was your experience at RealWave?
Joe: It was great. People are very personal. The treatment doesn’t hurt. Most times, I don’t even feel it.

Q. And you said before you didn’t think the treatment would work.
Joe: Well, I’ve been through a lot of different things that didn’t work. This is so non-invasive… I was a little leery, but I’m definitely a believer.