Heat in hands due to chemo?

My father-in-law has cancer and has been going thru chemo for about two months now. Yesterday they stopped over and he was freezing but his hands were red and very hot. He sat like this for a couple hours so for fun we had him hold a thermometer in his hands and within a few minutes it was up to 102.3. (My husband then held the thermometer and it only went to 95.4) Once the heat starts to pass in his hands his skin will start to peel. It's almost as if he has gotten a first or second degree burn on them. Anyone know what causes this?

Heat in hands due to chemo?
Yeah, it's from the chemo. Chemo is basically a poisen the kills cells. Not just cancer cells. In short they almost kill you every time they give it to you. The folks that inject it wear specially designed suites so as not to even get it on them, because it does cause burns if it touches the skin. Chemo is terrible to go through, and has a laundry list of side effects which we all know. One of them being Chemical burns from treatment
Reply:First of all, you can find a very specific answer to your question by asking your father-in-law to check with his doctor to find the exact name of his medications. He may already have that written down. Most pharmaceutical companies that make chemotherapy drugs have excellent websites to support their patients. Anyone can call a pharmaceutical company to report side effects and ask very specific technical information. The pharmaceutical companies employ highly educated specialists to provide drug information and address patient concerns.





My personal opinion about the temperature of Dad-in-law's hands is this. One of the types of chemotherapy that is frequently used today involves stimulation of the patient's own immune system. It can be considered over-stimulation due to the adverse effects. Inflammation is a term that you have probably heard many times in your life, usually associated with an infection or injury. Inflammation is an activity of your immune system that is the beginning of the healing process. When we have been injured, we take anti-inflammatory medication such as ibuprofen to reduce that immune response. This is because when you are injured, as long as you care for the injury by applying ice, bandaging if necessary, the inflammatory response only adds to your discomfort. In the case of an infection with a virus, bacteria or fungus; or in the case of your father-in-law - "infection" with a foreign type of cell, the inflammatory response is your body's way of fighting off the "enemy." While inflammation is not always accompanied by fever, often a fever is a sign that inflammation is occurring within the body. When a fever is beginning, your body's thermostat is set to a higher temperature and you will feel very cold until your body gets where it is going. Thus, your father-in-law, while "freezing", was most likely running a fever and had not yet peaked at the temperature of his fever.





Depending upon the location of the cancer cells in his body and the type of chemotherapy he is receiving, it might be possible that the redness and high temperature of his hands is the result of a massive inflammatory response. The mechanism of fever in the body is a complicated process. I just did a Google search on "mechanism of fever in the human body." One of the results was "Lectures on the Study of Fever" by Alfred Hudson. I looked over this quickly and reassured myself in the reading of this old piece of literature that fever is still a quite complicated process in the human body. My best educated guess is that the inflammatory response is occuring in the blood stream, and that when the circulation reaches the small capillaries of the hand, certain complexes of immune system cells that have bonded with foreign cells or chemotherapy are simply too large to move on through the vascular system. These very small particles then, are sitting in his hands in the arterial capillaries and while they do that, they are sending messages to the immune system in the rest of his body. "Come here, fight this off, it won't move." Consequently a war of sorts is being waged in his hands. The fever in his body peaks first in his hands.





This is purely conjecture, but I attended graduate school in the pharmaceutical sciences and opted to take advanced immunology at the time. Thus, while I am not certain of the precise reason for the heat in his hands, this is a plausible explanation.





I suggest that he use cool water packs or short (5 to 10 minutes) periods of time with a bag of frozen peas held in his hands to relieve the discomfort. This won't halt the process that has been deliberately begun by chemotherapy, but would help what is most certainly an unpleasant side effect.





May God bless you and your family and lead you to all the answers that you need to get you through this difficult time.