Laurie was determined to keep swimming and came up with a novel approach.
Transcript
And then I thought well that’s not great because where I live in (city in QC) the swimming pool is more or less in my back yard and in the summer I always go for a swim before going to sleep because then I sleep better because I’m cooled off. And even more so if they stick you on Tamoxifen, which makes you have hot flashes and they’re radiating you so you’re hot, so swimming feels even better. So I thought hmm how am I going to swim when they told me not to swim? So then I looked into it a bit more and I actually found on the web, not scientific articles, but experience from other breast cancer people who had written to some of the discussion forums on one of the official breast cancer things. And several of them said, “Yeah, yeah I swam fine and I just made sure that I put a sort of a thick lotion, sort of a more oily one, that would protect the skin while I swam and then afterwards I made sure I rinsed it really well and then put my normal stuff back on and it was fine.” And I thought, “Okay that sounds reasonable so let’s try that,” and then I was worried, “Okay but what about this washing off of the marks business, because they’re not going to be happy.” And then I thought, “Well you know those tri-athletes they start with swimming and they have numbers written on them and the numbers are still there at the end of their triathlon. So maybe I should find out what kind of markers they use.” So I looked up on the Internet and sure enough there are special sports markers that are for this, so I ordered some and I took them to the radiation therapist and said, “Let’s use these markers instead of your markers and we’ll see if they don’t wash off,” and they worked pretty well.
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