I've been debating something. Now that I've completed "active treatment", I wondered if I needed to keep posting my daily blog. I mean, really, will I have something to talk about every single day? This morning first thing, Hubby held up his phone with this page on it and said "No blog yesterday?". I don't fool myself into thinking I have a cult-like following on here, but I guess I'll keep going for the people who look for an update every day. I wouldn't want to let any of my peeps down! Besides, I figure I'm pretty much going to be "kicking cancer's ass" every day for the rest of my life, because every day I'm alive is a win for me.
My skin is healing well from radiation. I was lucky to not have too bad of a reaction. I had a few red areas (thankfully in places I have don't have much feeling thanks to my surgery) and itchy spots in other places, but the lotions I've been using have been taking care of them. I'm going to have to be very careful this summer to not expose any of the radiated area to the sun, but my skin really handled treatment well.
My pec muscles are very tight, and the "cording" under my arm has gotten worse thanks to radiation, so I'm going to have to go back to my daily stretches (which are NOT fun) like I had to do after surgery. When I heard my doctors and other patients talk about everything "tightening up" from rads, I thought they meant skin. I had no idea all of the muscle and tissue in the radiated area would suffer the worst in that respect. Hopefully I can avoid having to do any more physical therapy, but we'll see.
Next week I will start taking Tamoxifen again, so I'll probably have a few side effects from that. I was on it for about six weeks before radiation, though, and it didn't seem too bad, so hopefully I'll tolerate it well. We will head to Dallas on June 12th for appointments with my surgical oncologist, my plastic surgeon and my gynecological oncologist. The appointment with my surgeon is the first since a week after my surgery. I'm not sure how often I'll have to follow up with her after this. My plastic surgeon wants to evaluate me after radiation, but we won't do anything reconstruction-wise for another six months or so. When we meet with the gynecological oncologist we will discuss the timetable for my hysterectomy. Since I'm at a higher risk for ovarian cancer and Tamoxifen can cause uterine problems, they pretty much want me to get rid of all of my female parts. Good riddance, I say!
So that's my medical update as of now. I'll try to think of something witty and entertaining to write about tomorrow. Happy weekend!
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