It is important to treat lymphedema as early as possible to prevent physical damage; Debbra had to push to see a lymphedema specialist.
Transcript
And so again it was me pushing to be referred to a lymphedema specialist to be able to try to get my arm under control and the thing that the physicians don’t understand which I’m working with the Lymphedema Association too. As I said ‘I’m kind of a quiet, shy reserved woman’; it is something the GP’s (General Practitioner) don’t understand. They don’t understand that it doesn’t really matter how many lymph nodes you take out, if those are the major lymph nodes that are clearing your system you can get lymphedema and if you stop lymphedema in a 0-stage or stage 1, you can reverse it and you can keep it under control. If it goes up to the higher stages then you’re going to have tissue damage and a whole bunch of other issues that are going to get you into trouble long-term. And this is a chronic thing but if you control it and you’re aware of it and you have the garments to keep the pressure down, or keep the pressure on and keep the swelling down then you can protect it from going to the next stage and so I think that there’s a huge opportunity in the healthcare system because that’s also when you come back from surgery. Two of the pamphlets I was given to do exercises were giving conflicting information in terms of when I should be doing the exercises and the type of exercises I should be doing and things like that.
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