With each life-saving cancer treatment, there are significant side effects that impact your day-to-day life and activity level. Due to many of these surgical and adjuvant therapies, treatment-induced fatigue can occur. Your body needs to recover, and, often, your body is in constant recovery mode.
Causes of Treatment Induced Fatigue
The most commonly discussed cause of treatment induced fatigue is chemotherapy, however, there are many treatments that can cause fatigue.
Chemotherapy
With chemotherapy, there are a lot of side effects that can affect your overall activity tolerance, and this is the most linked treatment to fatigue.
Radiation
Breast cancer patients receive daily radiation treatments, so they will have this treatment 5 times a week- sometimes for up to 4 weeks long. With both chemotherapy and radiation, the actual physiology of the treatment causes fatigue. While individual radiation sessions are only minutes long, your body still has to recover from the cumulative effects.
Surgery
Patients may undergo a lumpectomy or mastectomy to remove the tumor and then later have choices for reconstruction. Reconstruction options vary, and for some with autologous tissue flaps, patients may be under anesthesia for up to 10 hours.
Physical Therapy for Treatment Induced Fatigue
A big part of treating patients who have treatment induced fatigue is being their advocate and understanding what they are going through. If you are with a healthcare provider who doesn’t understand your condition or just does not have the experience and the knowledge of what you are going through, you can feel lost and unheard. So, a big part of our treatment is identifying that the fatigue exists, and it is real. Just because you have completed treatment and maybe you don’t look sick does not mean you cannot at times feel sick.
The second biggest part of treatment for physical therapy is all about exercise prescription and modifying as necessary so patients can succeed. We may regress or progress our exercise intensity/volume/load based on how a patient is feeling. It is very individualized, and we grade each patient’s exposure to activities so they can continue to do what they love- just at a modified frequency, intensity, volume or range of motion.
Seeing a physical therapist who is well equipped to identify your treatment induced fatigue as well as progress and regress in your prescriptive exercise is vital. We have the knowledge and the experience to help you move and feel better post-treatment.
If you are undergoing or have completed cancer treatment, schedule an appointment with a Spooner Breast Health Specialist today!