Tomorrow I will have 5 of 6 weeks of radiation under my belt.  It really has flown.  So far I’m not really burning either!  My doctor and therapist are amazed and I’m thrilled.  Trust me, the thoughts of being burnt and having blisters on my chest weren’t very exciting but I was facing it as “it is what it is” because after all the crap cancer does to you, you just learn to roll with it.  However, so far at least, I’m not having to roll with this one too badly!

This week I also visited a Lymphedema specialist.  My chest has been quite swollen for the last month or so and I didn’t want to dink around and let it get out of control.  She had very good news for me and was able to explain it in a language that I could understand.  First of all, she really doesn’t think I have lymphedema but wants me to come back in a couple of weeks so she can look at it again.  What’s going on is this, it’s swelling.  You know how if you sprain your ankle it will swell up.  Your body sends fluid there so it can fix the injury.   Well, the end of November I was “injured” when I had my surgery so my body sent fluid there to fix it.  Since then, I’ve been “injuring” it every day by have radiation so my body keeps trying to fix it.  She expects that once the radiation stops the swelling will go away.  If it doesn’t go away on it’s own she has some special tape she can put on me that will help.  I guess the tubes (?) that carry this fluid are right below the skin.  This tape lifts the skin and gives the tubes more room to carry the fluid away.  Make sense?

She did give me one piece of bad news, but, as I said earlier, I’m learning I have to roll with it because cancer really is a nasty thing.  Well, come to think of it, the things I’m going to have to live with are not from the cancer, they are from the cure to cancer, chemo.  But, without chemo I’d be dead so I guess the alternative is to live with the side effects.  Anyway, in my left hand my middle and pointer fingers have gone numb.  She said I would probably never get them back because it’s caused from chemo.  I can’t quite just roll with that side effect because it keeps me awake at night and I don’t have full range of motion with it so I’m working on finding ways to massage it or something to bring it back to me.  My other lovely side effect is the watery eyes I have from the clogged tear ducts.  I could probably get those fixed but I’m not sure if it’s worth the price of torture.  So far, I’m living with it.

Next week I meet with my oncologist and will discuss with her about going back to work.  The “end” of this journey is almost here.  Well, I still have appointments every 3 weeks to get Herceptin but once every 3 weeks is nothing compared to what the past several months have been.  I also have another pretty major surgery in a year or so but that seems like forever from now.   I can’t even begin to express how happy I will be to have this chapter of my life closed.

For those of you that follow my other blog, I finally updated it and there is something very exciting there you might want to read.