On Monday, March 14, I served as the Keynote Speaker and Survivor Model for the 20th Annual Hope Fashion show in Atlanta. I was so honored to be asked to speak and I’m proud to say the event raised over $100,000 for the American Cancer Society. I do a lot of events for a living and this one was simply fantastic!In the speech, the ACS team urged me to speak about my journey and how my doctor nicknamed me, “Sally Side-Effect” because if something was going to happen, it was going to happen to me. Well, God must have heard me, because a few days later, I got a call from my doctor saying he wanted to refer me to see if I was a candidate for hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT).
During HBOT, the patient breathes 100% oxygen while enclosed in a pressurized chamber at two to three times greater than normal atmospheric pressure. While breathing pure oxygen, the patient’s blood plasma becomes saturated carrying 15-20 times the normal amount of oxygen to the body’s tissue. This increase of oxygen to the tissue produces several benefits to the areas affected: promotes new blood vessels; decreases swelling and inflammation; deactivates bacterial toxins; increases the body’s ability to fight infection; and improves the rate of healing.
Long story short, basically I think my doctor didn’t like how my radiated skin was responding, hence the reason for the conservative route of having an additional surgery. The goal for HBOT is to heal my radiated skin and they feel this can be accomplished even 13 months after radiation ended.
It was explained to me as such: when you cut your skin, the skin around it notices a huge change in oxygen levels and immediately begins trying to heal the damaged skin. Well with radiation, the burns are diffused from the center out. So the center area which got directly hit is next to skin only a percentage different and so on and so on, so the healthy skin never understands it needs to heal the burned skin because the center to the edge is so far away.
While I was very excited about this opportunity, when I learned more about the therapy, I realized what an inconvenience it will be. I will have to go to Piedmont Hospital every day (M-F) for four weeks. The appointments are 2 hours long and you are in the chamber for 90 minutes. You can’t bring anything into the chamber, but they do have a TV you can watch (no remote though!). The chamber actually looks like a bank tube (see photo). What m
akes it even more inconvenient is you cannot wear anything in the chamber but a cotton hospital gown: no contacts, hair care products, lotion, deodorant, NOTHING! Which means I have to lug all my stuff to get ready for work there each day. My appointments will be at 8 a.m. each day, so I will get to work hopefully by 11 a.m. each day. And I’m going to have to work longer hours at night to make up for hours I’m missing in the morning. I realize it is a small price to pay for the rest of my life, but it still just stinks.And I know I should not be complaining. I have a friend that was just diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. The thing I told him was, “If you are going to plan anything, plan for the unexpected. I drove myself crazy trying to plan how everything would go and nothing goes as planned. Just be flexible and take each day one day at a time.” Well what a hypocrite I was…. Here I got news that my plans had changed and I got upset again. I just have to remind myself, I cannot control this.
So, now my surgery has been rescheduled for April 21. That will give me four weeks to heal before I head out to my first big vacation of the year to Yellowstone! It’s cutting it a lot closer than I wanted to. I thought I was going to be finished Feb. 3 when I planned the trip, but I’m going to work hard during the recovery to get as strong as I can for that vacation!
Love to you all!
Marcy
