From the first moment
my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from
the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer
seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did
little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known
reason, I started this blog…
I’ll be 58 in a few days and like many folks my age,
(besides getting the quarterly invitation to join letter from AARP), I have
aches & pains. Sore back, stiff joints, increased fatigue after doing “regular
stuff”, pre-diabetic blood sugars, failing eyesight, fading hearing, all the
kinds of things we associate with aging.
My wife experiences some of the same things – but there’s a
twist now.
When talking about a stiffness here or swelling there, the
breast cancer survivor has the added, “elephant in the room” – is the ache or
pain caused by breast cancer resurgence or the meds that they have been taking
for years?
In other words, are these simple aches & pains, or are
they symptoms of the cancer or the anti-cancer drugs, and urge a visit to the
cancer clinic rather than the medicine cabinet for some Tylenol? What I think of
as ACHES & PAINS!!!!
It seems that there is a certain amount of fatigue that
accompanies a woman after successful breast cancer treatment, “Fatigue is a
normal response to breast cancer treatments like chemotherapy and radiation
therapy, but one-third or more of breast cancer survivors report continued
debilitating fatigue long after treatment has ended.”
While the first resource listed below was written before
2011, current research seems to be uncovering even more startling information!
“Pat Christian beat stage 3 breast cancer. But 5 years
later, she's still fighting fatigue. She
says, ‘Your body is not the same. After
you go through chemo or radiation, your body is not the same.’ That's why the
57-year old non-profit founder volunteered for a study at Emory Medical School,
to see if massage therapy can help breast cancer survivors cope with
fatigue. She was skeptical. Christian says, ‘When they told me about the
treatment, I was, like, right! I just
really didn't think it was going to make a big difference…’”
The fact is that no one told my wife about cancer-fatigue. I’d
never heard of it, either.
When we went to a B&B several years ago, part of the
package offered a massage session. We took them up on it – my wife had the bath
salt and massage, I had the hot rock massage. It WAS fantastic!
But NOW, maybe we need to do it again. We know all about
aches & pains and now it appears that ACHES & PAINS!!!! are real. And
apparently, those ACHES & PAINS!!!!, clinically identified as
cancer-fatigue have a real cause – and a real solution.
We’ll let you know what happens!
Resource: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/cncrfatigue.htm,
http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/story/28813519/can-massage-help-breast-cancer-fatigue-emory-researchers-look-for-answers, http://www.breastcancer.org/treatment/side_effects/fatigue
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