Do I have neuropathy?

[blackbeauty40]

Hi everyone, I hoping that someone can help me with some answers because Google searches are not helping at all. For a while, I've been having some numbness and tingling in my left foot that comes and goes, it's like my foot has fallen asleep, but in my arms and hands, the pain and numbness is kinda bad. My hands feel cold, it's like I have socks or something on them when I try to touch something so it's like a "muffled" kind of sensation.  The feeling I have is like a buzzing type of feeling and it's bad enough to make me want to cry on a daily basis. The last time I saw the doctor, my t-cell count was 473 and my viral load was really, really low (about 200-300).  I've been mentioning this to my doctor for some time but it seems to be dismissed. I'm frustrated because the pain is starting to get bad but I don't want to keep mentioning it because it's been dismissed for so long. I also have been prescribed Truvada, which I haven't been taking on a regular basis because the nausea I get from it is so bad. Any advice on what I should do or what this may be would be appreciated.

[Miss Philicia]

I see from you older posts that you've had HIV since 1992, so it's entirely possible that it could be neuropathy. But it also could be other things I suppose. The bottom line is that your doctor should be more responsive to this issue, so perhaps you need to re-strategize how you go about things with him. Why don't you try keeping a diary of these persistent sensation and present it to him during your next appointment, also insisting that it be inserted into your medical records. I think this will force the issue into a more responsive dialogue.
 
Other than that, and though our infections are about the same timespan, I'd not hazard a guess. I've had a lot of those same sensations with the hot/cold stuff, varying degrees of numbness. In the end once I had an EMG (electromyogram) test for neuropathy not much showed up. But I've had non-HIV related podiatry issues which were causing things, for which I had surgery. And I've begun to think I'm having arthritis issues lately, in fact I'm quite sure, but then that sensation is quite different.