From day one I was told to get my arm above your head. You read on the BCC site, you know, get your arm right round the back and do all these things. So I was keen obviously to get better and get back to fitness if you like and for everything to heal properly. So I did exactly what they said. Day three they discovered I had this nerve damage and that was only, again you don’t know what to expect. I mean, I originally had nerve damage right down my leg. Nerve pains, you know, just like, it’s like electric shocks and like stinging and burning goes on, you know. Like jabbing. As if somebody’s pricking you with hot needles kind of thing. You know. And it was, you know, the surgeon had come in and how was I? And I said, “Oh, you know, I feel fine.” And this was, of course you’re getting all the jabby pains going on with everything healing in there as well. But, I said, “But I can’t understand why have I got pain…” I had, right round my bottom and where I have it all the time is here. But right round my bottom I had it. Right down to my privates, here. I had kind of like a numbness round there. My back felt very, very strange. It was so swollen I guess and kind of numb. And I’ve still got numb areas on my back. But I also had all these pains going down my leg. But they’ve gradually lessened. And I thing the gabapentin has helped a lot. It’s a nerve painkiller, I guess it would be. I don’t know. It sorts out the nerves a bit.
Anyway, so it’s been a lot better since I’ve been on that but I still, a couple of nights ago, because I’ve done a bit of cleaning or whatever, I end up with ice packs here and on my back sometimes, you know, it gets that sore. Just to numb it, it feels better [laughs].
Yeah. And what are they going to do now. You mentioned you’d had more surgery.
I see my surgeon on Tuesday evening and I should be in again fairly quickly. What’s happened is I had indentations appeared about six weeks. And apparently that’s quite common. Because I do have a small implant in as well. And I saw the breast cancer care nurse on the Friday and I said, you know, she says, “Oh come up and I’ll have a look.” And she said to start massaging it. Now I’d not been told that before at all. So I was massaging it, you know, with the cream and by Sunday evening I’d, you know, started massaging it and I thought, “Well that’s really quite sore there,” you know.
And when I looked down I thought, “God that looks really strange.” Because this was all caved in here. And instead of just having a couple of little indentations here that looked really quite dark, the whole thing was dented in here sort of thing, you know. And seemed to have moved across. So I phoned and they said to come in and see [the surgeon] on the Tuesday evening, which I did. No, the following Tuesday, it was like a week and a bit later. So instead of going at my three-month assessment I went at two months. And he just took one look at it and he says, “Yeah,” he says, “the muscle’s pulled away. The back muscle’s pulled away from the chest wall muscle. So we’re going to need to reattach that.”
Right, so how …
But he said he wanted to wait until everything had settled down, because I’ve had a lot of contracting. I think, you know, I was quite athletic in my youth and dancing and things like that. And, even now just walking, it’s constantly, jump, jump, jumping. It still thinks it’s a back muscle. You know. So I don’t know if I’ve been given the right physiotherapy. I mean I’ve got a list like this to ask him, of questions. What if this and what if that? Why this and why that? And see what happens, you know. But I need to get something done about it. Because it does get quite painful and quite often I sit at night just literally holding it back where it’s supposed to be.
