Trusting Your Instincts
By Sheryl
May 17,2010
I’m usually pretty compliant when it comes to medical advice. I trust my doctors to be up on the latest studies and be able to disseminate information and share it with me. I like to think of us as a team in making sensible, workable medical decisions; a give- and- take exercise in finding the best solutions.
But there was one time in my breast cancer journey that I defied my doctor’s advice. That was the standard advice – which was “common medical knowledge” – to never lift weights after a mastectomy. Never.
For years it was believed that this could bring on lymphedema, a painful and debilitating post-surgery condition that affects about 30 percent of U.S. breast cancer survivors. Lymphedema can occur when lymph nodes in the armpit are removed to check the cancer’s spread. Sometimes your remaining lymph nodes are unable to compensate for the ones that have been removed and fluid cannot drain adequately, leading to swelling in the arm. Lymphedema can include fatigue, numbness and reduced limb mobility. It can predispose you to other complications like fibrosis, cellulitis, infections and septicemia.
Other lymphedema-avoidance measures include avoiding blood draws and injections in the arm on the mastectomy side, and elevating the limb to promote fluid drainage. Knowing the early warning signs and symptoms can help reduce the risk as well. You can read what the American Cancer Society reports on understanding lympedema here.
Despite my doctor’s orders not to lift weights – or anything heavy like groceries or even my children, for that matter – I guess I was considered a “non-compliant” patient: I returned to the gym as soon as I was able and slowly worked myself back into an exercise program, including careful weight lifting. (The only exercise I was permitted to do, in order to regain some range of motion in my arm and surrounding area, was walk my fingers up and down a wall like a spider. Thrilling, no.) I did not want my muscles to atrophy from non-use. I wanted desperately to continue to be strong and fit throughout my everyday life. I continued to pick up my toddlers because I still needed to hold them and feel close. And I felt great.
I had regained not only my strength but my confidence as well. Breast cancer had altered so much in my body and in my life, I was determined not to let it alter everything. Interestingly, since that time, a relatively new finding has surfaced in a report on how weight lifting can ease arm sweeling in the breast. Rather than worsen lymphedema, researchers say, lifting weights can actually ease it. When they studied 141 women who had already been affected by lymphedema, it was found that among the women who continued to lift weights the severity of their symptoms improved, as did their upper-and-lower body strength. Not only that, but many of the women reported feeling stronger and better than before their surgeries.
What does this all mean? Well, for me it means to trust your instincts. Granted, I’m not a doctor and I was taking a chance by going against the well-meaning professional and popular advice. And I’m certainly not advocating ignoring your health professional.
But I felt, deep in my gut, that movement and strength could only have a positive effect on a part of my body that was already so compromised by my surgery. (And my mind and mental state needed it just as badly.)
It also tells me that conventional wisdom, while researched and popularized, can easily shift in the opposite direction given enough time and reconsideration.
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