ENCORE #159! – After the Drama...Nothing But Hassle

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer in March of 2011, there was a deafening silence from the men I knew. 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…That was four years ago – as time passed, people searching for answers stumbled across my blog and checked out what I had to say. The following entry first appeared in March of 2017.

I confess that from the moment my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, life whirled out of our control. Following the initial biopsy, tears, surgery, chemotherapy, and checkups – all of which were high drama – things calmed down considerably as time blurred the clear recollection of that drama. During that time, my wife jammed her hand against a wall, and we set off on a second, albeit much less exciting journey called Lymphedema.

Six years later, the adventure has become more of a “plodding slog” than anything else and has been, to put it mildly, a pain in the…well, let me explain a teeny bit of it.

MONTHS ago, my wife ordered a new “overnight sleeve” to help control lymphedema.

She has ordered compression sleeves, gloves, and other materials from them in the past and aside from being ridiculously difficult to get to (the place is literally buried in a poorly marked warren of industrial park businesses), she’s often been able to get what she needed.

I say often because there have been problems with the garments being incorrectly sewn, too tight, cut wrong, and other, less critical problems.

This past time, this company has created NOTHING buy hassle for her/us. From claims that “insurance doesn’t pay for this” to, “yes, yes, we ordered it but it hasn’t gotten here yet”, the sleeve was so mired down in what I can only think of in the most polite of terms as office confusion, that we ordered a “non-custom-made” sleeve from an online company.

It arrived promptly and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, it’s a sort of “one-size-fits-these-measurements” kind of thing. It’s also uncomfortable (in its defense, NO compression sleeve can ever be said to be comfortable!) and while it’s currently the tail-end of winter and sweltering isn’t a problem (it’s 8°F (-16°C) this morning), it will become a problem in August. It’s also huge.

I don’t exactly recall how big the first one was, but it didn’t seem to be this big!

At any rate, this entire journey into the hideous world of post-breast cancer lymphedema might have been prevented half-a-decade ago if my wife’s doctor had begun immediate treatment after she jammed her hand against a wall on Thanksgiving day in 2011. THAT doctor didn’t “believe in” lymphedema treatment and so did nothing. What were WE to do? We knew less about breast cancer and lymphedema than he did, so we had no idea we should advocate for more aggressive treatment. (See: http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-friend-scare-minnesota-state-fair-one.html)

No one had bothered to mention lymphedema and the possibility of the “cure becoming worse than the disease”. Because at THIS point, there’s nothing anyone can do…

Whoops, did I say nothing they CAN do? I meant to say that NO ONE IS DOING ANYTHING FOR POST-MASTECTOMY/NODE-REMOVAL BREAST CANCER PATIENTS WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED LYMPHEDEMA!!!! (http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2012/11/lymphedema-treatment-past-presentis.html)

They have new surgical techniques to PREVENT it, which I reported on here: http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2016/08/breast-cancer-research-right-now-48.html, but is there anything that can TREAT it?

That will be my next BC Research RIGHT NOW!!!

Image: https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5527/10893068965_1d328e8f71_b.jpg