I don't believe that everything happens for a reason. (CW, cancer stuff)
Well, I’m done with the radiation treatments. They gave me a certificate and a cute pink superheroine pen and let me pin a pink ribbon to a corkboard. (It felt a lot like fifth grade, honestly, and even though I loathe the &*^%*& pink ribbon thing I was genuinely moved. Even though they didn’t give me a donkey to pin it on.)
The recovery is… painful. The areas that they stopped irradiating when they shifted to the more focused treatments are healing, which is nice. But the area that got the biggest and most focused dose looks like a Hollywood radiation burn makeup job—dead exfoliating skin, raw patches, significant pain. Also, one of my incisions has opened up enough that it’s oozing some rather revolting stuff (dead white blood cells in quantity, which looks like the yellow gunk you get out of your sinuses when you have a bad sinus infection but at least doesn’t smell horrible) so I have to keep it covered as much as possible, or it’ll get all over my clothes. And my clothes will stick to the wound and peel the raw skin away.
I told a friend that I felt like I had tried to quarterback scramble the Demon Core. Yikes.
I have to keep slathering the creams on, which is quite painful (peeling the dressings off is painful too) as, you know, raw flesh objects to contact with, well, anything. And I have to wear a bra for various reasons, including the fact that taping the dressings in place is patently impossible (If you’ve ever had a bad sunburn that blistered, imagine sticking tape to that) and because the edema in the breast in question is worse if I don’t give it a little support. (The edema is in part due to trauma and burns and in part due to the lymph nodes that were removed as part of my surgery, which means that my body will have to establish new ways to drain that fluid. I’m fortunate: they only took two nodes and neither were the deep armpit ones that drain lymph from the arm, so I’m not having to try to manage edema in my arm as well as my breast.)
Sleeping is also an adventure, because I need to position myself so that I am on my right side (so the lymph can drain out of the left breast) and the pain from the burns is bad enough that it wakes me up about twice a night to put more burn cream on, which of course hurts like a motherfucker because of raw flesh. I was trying to sleep in a soft old bra (my Yankee tendency to never throw anything away has been vindicated: stretched out old soft bras with no elastic left in the underarms are currently saving my life) padded with gauze, but the pressure on the wound is too painful after a couple of hours. And if I try to sleep in a shirt, it sticks to the burns and gets crusty from the drainage, which hurts. So I’m sleeping topless with the sheets folded down under an old towel so they don’t get covered in horror.
And my left arm has no good position to be in, because it’s either touching the burn (OW) or in a weird spot over my head that is only quasi-comfortable.
The intermittent stabbing pains in the breast in question are just the bonus round.
I hope this nonsense heals fast. I cannot recommend any of it.
Anyway, next week I have to call and make appointments for: followup with my general surgeon; a mammogram; a colonoscopy; and the shingles vaccine, which I didn’t get yet because I turned fifty in the middle of cancer treatment and decided that the covid booster, flu shot, tetanus, and pneumonia vaccines were higher priority. At least I seem to have the Tamoxifen side effects wrangled to a tolerable level, and so far it’s not making my hair fall out, though the gabapentin is not doing me any favors in the weight gain front—which triggers inflammation and my autoimmune stuff, so I need to figure out some solution to all of that.
It’s a grind, I tell you what. Last Thursday (January 27th) was the five-month anniversary of my diagnosis and the four-month anniversary of my surgery. It feels like this has been my life forever, at this point.
One good thing is that now that I am done with radiotherapy I am much less worried about getting Covid or any of the other respiratory illnesses that are flattening everybody I know this winter. I don’t want to get sick, mind you. But at least now if I do, I won’t be delaying finishing my treatment by weeks.
Anyway, this too shall pass.
tl:dr don’t get cancer if you can help it, folks.
Lots of love,
Bear