How A 62-Year-Old In Wisconsin Got The Burning Chemotherapy Left In Her Hands And Feet To Settle Down

“Nobody asked about my hands once the treatment ended. A woman at my Thursday group put a jar in my tote bag, and by week 3 I had stopped checking my feet before bed.”

Carol P., 62 · Wisconsin  /  September 11, 2026

My last chemotherapy was on a Thursday in February.

My sister drove up from Madison and there was a cake on the counter when I got home.

I was tired in a way I could not explain to anybody, and I was glad, and both of those were true at the same time.

The scans were good that spring. They were good again in the fall.

By summer people had mostly stopped asking how I was doing, which is what you want. It means you are through it.

I am grateful. I want to say that before I say the rest of this.

The rest of this is that my hands and my feet never went back.

There is a burning in both feet that comes up in the evening and stays.

My fingertips buzz, the way your arm does when it has gone to sleep, except it does not stop.

Cold water at the kitchen sink makes both hands light up.

I have quilted since I was 30. I finished a top last March and I could not have told you what the fabric felt like.

Treatment ended and this came home with me.

Everything about my treatment had a plan. This part did not.

I brought it up at every appointment, and I want to be fair about it.

My oncologist wrote it down every time. She never once made me feel like I was complaining.

She told me straight that a lot of it settles in the first year and some of it does not, and that for the part which does not there is not much.

Mine did not settle.

At my 1 year visit a nurse went down a checklist and asked me to rate the numbness out of 10. I said 6. She wrote 6.

Here is what I tried over the 2 years after that, roughly in order.

• A prescription I took for about 4 months and came off, because it flattened me out
• B vitamins, because a woman at the group swore by them
• Acupuncture, 8 sessions, an hour of driving each way
• Compression gloves I could not get on by myself
• Wool socks in July
• A dish pan of warm water by my chair in the evening
• Gardening gloves kept in the kitchen, for the freezer

Some of it did something.

The warm water was the one thing I kept. It gives me about 20 minutes, then it goes cold.

I would have kept up the acupuncture if it were not 2 hours in the car.

None of it really helped in the evening, when I finally sit down and my feet start burning.

I was not looking for a cure by then. I had stopped expecting anybody to hand me one.

I wanted something for the worst hour of the day.

So I wrote down what I needed from the next thing I tried.

It had to be something I put on, not another thing to swallow.

It had to be gentle enough for skin that had been through what mine had.

And I wanted to be able to send it back.

There was one more rule I did not write down. I was finished with anything that promised to fix this.

A woman at my Thursday group put a jar in my tote bag.

The group meets in a room at the back of the hospital. About half of us are years out now.

Denise finished 3 years ahead of me. She has the same thing, mostly in her hands.

She did not make a speech about it. She put a jar in my bag while we were stacking the chairs and said to try it on my feet at night.

It stayed in my bag for most of the week.

I opened it on a Tuesday evening when I could not get comfortable and had already had the dish pan out once.

I put a little on the inside of my wrist first and left it a day, because my skin had been odd since treatment.

Nothing happened, so that night I did both feet.

The cool came first. About 10 minutes later, I noticed a warmth underneath it, and the burning felt quieter.

I sat there a while waiting for it to come back up.

I went to bed without the dish pan.

The lid said Lune.

I looked them up the next morning, the way I look everything up now.

It is a small jar for the money, and heavier than it looks.

There are 2 in the house now, one by my chair and one in the bathroom.

I started doing my hands after the first week, which had not occurred to me at first.

I read labels differently since treatment.

That started with food and it never stopped.

I read the back of the jar at the kitchen table with my glasses on, before I used it a second time.

Frankincense was first on the list, which I had not expected.

Then arnica. My mother kept arnica in the house for bruises.

Calendula, witch hazel, willow bark. I know what most of those are.

Frankincense · Arnica · Cayenne · Hemp seed oil

Magnesium chloride · Menthol · Peppermint · Camphor · Calendula · Witch hazel · MSM · Willow bark · Glucosamine · Algal omega‑3 · Niacinamide · Panthenol · Vitamin E · Jojoba · Mango seed butter · Arrowroot

There is menthol on the list too, and peppermint, and that is where the smell comes from.

Menthol appears farther down the ingredient list, underneath a dozen things I had to look up.

I looked every one of those up before I used it again. That is the habit now.

What Chemotherapy Did, And What A Cream On The Skin Can Do

I asked Denise what it was actually doing. She did not know either, so I went and read.

The drugs that treat the cancer travel through the whole body, and they do not only reach the cancer.

The nerves that run out to the hands and feet are some of the longest in the body, which helps explain why these areas can be affected.

That is why the burning and numbness can show up in the fingers and toes first.

Here is the part I had to be honest with myself about.

That damage is real, and a cream does not reach it.

Nerve Balm does not go in and undo what the treatment did. Nothing you rub on your skin does that.

What it does is provide topical comfort on the skin where I feel the burning.

The cool arrives in the first few minutes. The warmth follows, and that is blood moving in the area.

The other ingredients are there to complement the cooling and provide additional topical comfort.

It has not given me my fingertips back. I want to be straight about that, because I would have wanted somebody to be straight with me.

The numbness in the ends of my fingers is where it was 2 years ago.

What changed is the burning in the evening, and how much room my feet take up in my head.

1. Scoop. Use about a fingertip’s worth.
2. Rub. Work it into both feet, and into your hands if that is where you feel it.
3. Wait. It absorbs in about a minute.

I do it after I brush my teeth, or I would forget.

If your skin is still fragile from treatment, patch test on your wrist first. Keep it off anything broken or open.

The first week was mostly the cool.

By about week 3 I had stopped checking my feet before bed, which I had been doing without knowing I did it.

I wanted to know whether any of this had been looked at properly.

I am not a scientist. I read on my lunch hour for a month.

One review pulled together 31 studies covering 4,179 people who had been through chemotherapy. A month after treatment, 68% of them had the nerve symptoms. At 6 months or more, 30% still did.¹

So about a third of us are still in it long after everybody stops asking.

There is a trial from 2024 on topical menthol. 60 women on chemotherapy for breast cancer were split in 2. Half rubbed a 1% menthol product into their hands and feet twice a day. At 3 weeks, and again at 6, that half reported more improvement than the half carrying on as usual.²

That was 60 women, and it was menthol on its own rather than this cream.

The American Society of Clinical Oncology updated its survivor guidance in 2020. On stopping the nerve damage in the first place, it says plainly that no agents are recommended.³

My oncologist had not been holding anything back from me.

The strongest research I found on topical capsaicin comes from higher-concentration products, including a prescription patch, rather than a cream like this one.^4, 5 The ingredients in this jar are there for the warming and cooling sensations you feel on the skin. The balm is applied directly to the areas where I feel the burning.

None of those papers is about this jar.

It has done nothing for the numbness, and I did not expect it to.

Hundreds Of Verified Buyers, And Some Of Them Finished Chemotherapy First

Go on Lune’s own site and you will find people who have been living with this for years.

Some of them after chemotherapy, some after diabetes, and some who never got a reason for it at all.

I read a good many of them before I ordered the second jar.