My arm tells me when the weather decides to change by swelling. Oh the joys of having breast cancer and having 30 of your lymphnodes removed which are more than 90% of the ones you have. So do you want a quick biology lesson????
Lymphedema
Lymphnodes are like tiny little pumps within your body. They help move lymph fluid around your body and remove nasty things to keep you healthy and remove infection from the body. So, when you remove these puppies, you still have fluid flowing but you don't have those pumps helping to pull the fluid out of the extremities. When the fluid gets into your extremities and you have reduced capacity of lymphnodes, the fluid gets stuck and stays there. In order to get the fluid out, you have to perform lymphatic massages and compression. If you see me rubbing my right arm, chest, shoulders, back or side (on the right side only), I am attempting to do a massage to get the fluid and lymphnodes in other areas of my body activated to accept the additional fluid that I will be moving manually. If you see me with these beautiful sleeves, horrible wrappings on my fingers, and/or wonder Ace looking bandages on my arms (only if it gets severe do the Ace bandage looking things come out), that is me compressing the fluid out.
So, why does it flare in the summer time? There are several reasons:
1) Heat causes your vessels to expand in order to keep your body cool. In doing so, more fluid is moved around the body and gets trapped much quicker than I can move it out.
2) Getting cuts or scratches can cause it swell also since when you get cuts or scrapes the lymph fluid is the fluid that goes to push bacteria out and keep it from getting infected. So, with extra fluid going to the rescue...
3) Exercising or extreme activity levels because you are moving fluids around more with increased heart beats.
4) Flying because of the change in elevation.... you can actually watch it swell as you ascending... but unfortunately, descending doesn't take it out... grrr... had a dude argue with me one time on this, I about snapped his head off but I remained the adult in the situation.
Things that help to control it:
1) lymphatic massage/manual drainage
2) compression
3) Stretching - yoga
4) Aerobics
5) Swimming does wonders! Yet another reason to go the beach!!!!!!! Woooooot! June 18th baby!
Now, I am bad and don't abide by these things because these sleeves are uncomfortable, create a lot of looks and questions and sometimes I just don't feel like talking about it, people telling me what I have and how to handle it who have NO idea what it is, and people thinking they know what it is and telling me how to handle it. I don't mind questions at all, in fact I like educating people on what it is so they are aware (the reason I do this blog) - I know it is something that people don't see all the time but don't try to lecture me on how I should try this or try that when you don't know what your talking about.
People who worked with me at HomEq understand that I was open to questions but I would give them my disclaimer "If you want to know something, please ask. I don't care how personal or embarrassing you think it is, there is no stupid question. You may not have wanted to ask your grandma questions and I am learning from this as I go and want to help people understand this disease and not be afraid of it. So ask the questions you have, however, understand that if you ask me a question, I will tell you all the nitty gritty details. I won't leave anything out." Everyone respected that and they would ask questions because we were all young and obviously, not many 25 year olds go through this thing. My point in saying this is...... if you have questions, please ask - I'd rather you ask then for you to have questions and wonder. My venting point above was for those individuals who say... "you don't know what your talking about", "well when I swell I do this to get it down (unrelated to lymphedema), just do that and then you don't have to wear those things", etc.
**Ring Ring**
Class, this is all for today's lesson! Have a great Memorial Day weekend!!!
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