Just a silly frivolous thought. I am blessed with a relatively hairless body. But as I have not been swimming for years i have let myself go and three hairs in the pit on the cancer side(none on the other side)
are the rads going to kill them??? As i said totally frivolous question, it would be easy to buy a tube of hair remover if I cared about them, just interested thats all.
ps-- everyone is different, but when should i start looking for skin changes?? only had 8 so far, so it seems a bit early
Mine are a bit bum fluffy too and only in the top half of my armpit. My skin began to get a bit hot and red after treatment ten. I only had fifteen treatments so got off lightly. Four days after last treatment I got something that resembled nettle rash, it started to disappear about three days later and the redness started to calm down too. I was quite worried about the effects to my skin as I’m very fair so I was pleasantly surprised.
I’d keep an eye on it, but if you are lucky there may be very little effect on your skin, or just a bit of pinkness from time to time. The main thing is to follow the skin care advice and try to expose the treatment area to air for at least a short time each day.
Your underarm hair may disappear entirely or in part.
Hee hee, OAL you have a great turn of phrase. If they zap the pit (as they did on my case, along the scar line from my node clearance) it kills the fuzz.
We had a hilarious moment at my breast cancer people’s exercise class when we were talking about this, and how some people now had one hairy pit and one baldy one. The class might sound cringey, but it’s not, we have a great laugh.
I have one hairy and one partly hairy one! So now you know.
On skin changes, I noticed them from day one - just keep an eye and use whatever moisturiser/gel they tell you as they tell you (every hosp seems to have different views)
Hi OAL
I found that the pit hairs were killed off by the rads, but only within the exact area that was treated by the rads. So I have a precise straight line across my BC armpit with hairs above and bald below. A year later this hasn’t changed so presumably they won’t grow back. Another oddity to look forward to is that the boob which has had rads doesn’t sweat - very strange!
As to skin changes, I got quite pink and tender after the first 4 or 5, started thinking oh sh*t this is going to be a problem, but then it settled down for the rest of the treatment. Most people find the worst period is 2 or 3 weeks after finishing rads because it has a cumulative effect, but I was OK.
The aspect which has pi**ed me off most is the stiffness in the arm/shoulder/boob area, which I don’t think we’re warned about enough.
Just think how much you’ll save on Immac! I also had the line thing, hair above line, none below. Couldn’t they just have done it all and saved me razor money. I have had laser hair removal before all this, and it looks like rads just work in the same way.
Hope its all going well otherwise.
S