Lucky #8

What a whirlwind of a day. Doctor's appointments, shopping and teaching. In that exact order.

Great news: I met with the lymphedema physical therapist for the first time in over a month. She was thrilled to see that my arm looks normal and has been holding steady for four weeks now. The proof is in the measurements, however, and I was eager to see what the percentage decrease would be.

When we first met in June, my right arm was 14.4% larger than the left. Then, I had a horrible reaction to the heated yoga room and it ballooned up to 21.9%. Simply gross. It took another month to get it down to 14% at our last meeting on July 27th.

Today, it is only 8%!! And, that is a 42% reduction in the size of my arm itself. Hello wrist bone! Hello elbow! Goodbye Popeye forearm! I think I may be able to wear jewelry on my right hand and wrist again after all. What a relief. I still have to wear a sleeve during the day and sleep in the night sleeve each night but, I will wean off of it after radiation and hopefully only have to wear a sleeve to workout.

Anyways.....

I promptly zoomed over to Nordstrom and put that newly svelte right arm and hand into action signing credit card slips. I lucked out and found some cute walking shoes for Australia, along with some Sanctuary shorts: all on sale. I need to be prepared for my trip, right?

Onto Radiation Oncology for full area treatment and new scans for the final 8 treatments. I have just one "full area" radiation left tomorrow. Thank goodness as my underarm is now officially raw and blistered.

Next, Dr. L came in and drew a circle around my incision and the assistant put wire around it, which felt very strange. The assistant then stuffed me into the CT-Scanner machine again so they could photograph the wired section of boob. The final eight treatments will be directed solely to this specific tumor bed area.

In addition to the CT-Scan photos, they once again took photos with a regular camera. Snapshots of me lying on my side, with a robe half-on, wire around my magic-markered breast cancer scar. I find these very odd. All I can say, is that once this blog is published as a book those photos better not surface on the internet.

I have a reputation to uphold.