Just Waiting for My Arms to Work

I finally got my drains out on Monday and was able to take a shower. In my eagerness to take a shower, I forgot how hard it would be to actually do so. I technically wasn’t supposed to lift my arms above a 45 degree angle until today, although I’ve been using comfort as my guide rather than carrying around a protractor to confirm that I’m not lifting my arms too high. I’ve still been very careful, and if a movement feels weird or tugs even a little, I back off. However, this has still resulted in much better arm mobility than I’m “supposed to” have at this point. Better than I’m supposed to have still only means that I can kinda sorta barely reach the top of my head to wash my hair.

Embracing my natural hair texture until I can hold up a blow dryer again.

I think this is a case where my athletic background may have really helped me. I'm sure the 45 degree rule was based on some sort of conservative average for women with a wide range of ages and fitness levels. Because I'm used to making judgement calls about how hard (or not) to push my body, I felt comfortable safely observing what my muscles were capable of within the context of the 45 degree guidelines. I suspect that whoever wrote those guidelines saw too many cases of "no pain, no gain" go badly. I'm lucky to live within the mindset of "test your limit, recover, then test it again". I hope that this means that I will continue to make rapid progress over the next couple of weeks.

Tuesday turned out to be the first day that I was home alone while Frank taught since the surgery. He only teaches Tuesdays and Thursdays this semester, and his mom was with me the first Tuesday, and then classes were cancelled last Thursday. The temperature was nearly 60 degrees, so I used my newfound freedom to walk to a coffee shop a mile away, get tea and a muffin, and come back. Since walking is really the only exercise I can do right now, I’m trying to work up to an hour a day, but that first outing really took it out of me.

Yesterday I finally got my pathology results back, and they were more or less what I suspected. Nipple and lymph node biopsies were clear, as well as all of the breast tissue margins. This means that I won’t require further treatment like radiation or chemotherapy. I didn’t expect that I would, but it’s nice to have confirmation. They did find two previously unknown spots of DCIS in the left breast, once of which was in a different quadrant, which confirms that the mastectomy was the right choice. If I’d gone with just a lumpectomy and radiation this round, I would almost definitely would have still had to have a mastectomy in a few years when the DCIS in the other quadrant got big enough to become noticeable, and I probably wouldn't have the option to do reconstruction with an implant at that point.

So now I have entered what I am calling my “Just Waiting for My Arms to Work” phase. The worst parts of the recovery are over, and I still have about 2.5 weeks before I go back to work part-time. This will be my time to get back to the point where I can do things like put on clothes that are men’s sized snap shirts, style my hair, and drive. It will also be my time for getting my endurance back to the point where I can do all of those things back-to-back without total exhaustion. I was warned that fatigue would be pretty bad a few weeks in, and now it is really making sense. It wasn’t that tiring when I couldn’t do anything, but now that I’m beginning to be able to do stuff, I'm realizing how tiring doing stuff is. Luckily, I planned for this, and I have the time off from work that I’ll need to rest and recover.