Diagnosed with breast cancer, having a mastectomy, about to start chemo. I was really surprised that my Oncologist does not want me around the horses AT ALL during chemo, which could be as much as 20 weeks 
For those of you who have gone through this, is this the same instruction giving by your doctors? Obviously my health comes first, but thatâs a LONG time to be away, especially since this is my professionâŠ
When I had chemo in '99, things may have changed since then. My oncologist advised me to see how things went for the first cycle, as far as blood counts. This would determine how careful I would need to be. He was more concerned about me being exposed to sick people than to barn dust and dirt. I didnât ride much due to lack of energy. One of our horses got an injury that needed to be wrapped so I did that. I did really well with the chemo and wound up working my desk job full time and doing some business travel. It was a difficult time.
Best wishes.
PM if you would like more info.
Best wishes to you.
My experience with chemo, also in '99, was as good as it can be. Although I was not really involved with horses, my daughter was taking lessons on a regular basis and I went to the barn with her and helped her groom the horses she rode. I was tired yes, but not sick from the chemo and spending time with horses was a therapy. I do not recall my oncologist discussing any special measures I had to take regarding horses, dogs or sick people.
I never missed a beat at home, was on kitchen duty every day!! I guess my attitude was âI have a disease, I am getting rid of it, but I am NOT sickâ. Like you, I had the mastectomy followed by chemo. Just be careful until the stitches are removed, but the horses may be worth a lot to your mental state. And that is important too!
[QUOTE=Vandy;5452328]
Diagnosed with breast cancer, having a mastectomy, about to start chemo. I was really surprised that my Oncologist does not want me around the horses AT ALL during chemo, which could be as much as 20 weeks 
For those of you who have gone through this, is this the same instruction giving by your doctors? Obviously my health comes first, but thatâs a LONG time to be away, especially since this is my professionâŠ[/QUOTE]
The issue is that until youâve had some of the chemo and they know how YOU react to it, they really canât predict how badly off your immune system will end up becoming - itâs not something to take lightly at all. Horses are, unfortunately, typically in an environment that is full of potential infections - not just bacteria but also fungi. If youâre on chemo and your immune system takes a big hit from it, you can easily get something that a healthy person wouldnât even develop. Then, since your immune system is compromised, youâll have a heck of a time fighting it off - your chemo treatment may need to be changed/halted, etc.
That said - if you really feel like your oncologist is not taking your needs seriously, you can get a second opinion. My mother has bone marrow cancer and her first doctor was basically âoh, just plan to take forever off work, we have social workers to help with things!â which is just - wtfbbq? Theyâre social workers, not miracle workers. (To say nothing of the mental and social benefits of doing a job you enjoy/find satisfying.) Between that and just utterly crappy bedside manner, she switched, and her new one is far better at helping to figure out compromises where safe to do so, or at least explaining why he wants her to do XYZ (or not do XYZ, as the case may be.)
I mean, it would be lovely if people could just drop everything and do what the doctor thinks is the âperfectâ response to a diagnosis, but real life does have to fit in there somewhere. (Heck, ideal from an infection pov would be a sterile room for the duration, but thatâs pretty hard on people mentally and emotionally, so they donât do it unless they have to.)
I rode all through Chemo for breast cancer. It kept me going getting up in the morning. Didnât think to ask about it just did it. No problems.
Listen to your doctor. Your immune system will be greatly compromised. And most important, Jingles for you!
Big jingles.:yes:
I have no personal experience, but have learned more than I ever wanted to know about chemo over the past few years. Iâm with chemteach and kdow - I think the problem is a compromised immune system, and being in an environment where there are fungi and other wee beasties.
My sister and my sister in law both had multiple myeloma - kdow, is that the type of bone marrow cancer your mom has? - and they had to be incredibly careful about exposure to feces/manure, dirt, fungi, etc. In fact, my SIL passed away, not from her cancer, but from a fungal infection she contracted while repotting her plants.
NOT to scare you - just to say that itâs wise to pay attention to doctorâs orders. Then once youâve kicked cancerâs @$$ youâll spend even more time at the barn to make up for it, yes?.
Big jingles and Iâm sorry you have to go through this butâŠyou will get through it and it will get better. I had a double mastectomy in '08 with four sessions of chemo. I didnât ride for four weeks after surgery until my drains were out and my chest was healed some. But my oncologist told me to keep doing what I felt up to doing during chemo and that included horses.
I didnât ride on chemo days or the next four day after. Youâre just too wiped out. Also I drank a lot of fluids to help flush the drugs from your system so was peeing a lot during those four days.
I rode and did stalls on all the other days, just much more slowly and took breaks when I needed to. Lost ALL my hair after the second chemo session. It started falling out by the handful so I shaved my head. I wore a knit cap with an attached bandana to the barn. They fit under my helmet and didnât slip like regular bandanas do when you have no hair. I felt pretty normal looking in them. Pm if you need a shoulder to cry on or any help. There are days still when I look in the mirror at my scars and it just seems unreal. Many women on this board have gone through this, you are not alone and you have our support.
I rode 10 days after my mastectomy just to prove I could. i rode all during chemo, it was radiation that wiped me out. My doctor totally supported my riding. this was 2007/08. Hmmm, maybe you need another doctor. This is also my profession. It was hard, but survivable. Please Pm me if you need any one to talk to. Sorry you joined this club. Sucks.
[QUOTE=pAinât_Misbehavinâ;5452898]
My sister and my sister in law both had multiple myeloma - kdow, is that the type of bone marrow cancer your mom has? - and they had to be incredibly careful about exposure to feces/manure, dirt, fungi, etc. In fact, my SIL passed away, not from her cancer, but from a fungal infection she contracted while repotting her plants.:([/QUOTE]
Wow, yes. Thatâs surprising since itâs considered a fairly rare type. (Sheâs lucky in that they caught it REALLY early on her when her only symptom was anemia, with no bone involvement at all. Then she got into a medical study to try a newer chemo drug than the standard treatment. So all in all sheâs doing reasonably well.)
And yup, thatâs exactly the issue. Iâve been on chemo drugs myself (at a much lower dose - for systemic arthritis) and even at those doses, they like you to be pretty cautious about what youâre doing and what youâre exposed to until theyâve got a series of blood tests back to see how your personal immune system is responding to the medication.
Since being diagnosed and starting treatment, my mom has been admitted to the hospital three or four times - because if she gets a cold or the sniffles and it gets to a certain point they just donât want to take chances. Once something gets established, if your immune system is compromised, itâs VERY difficult to deal with - none of our medical treatments replace the immune system, after all, they just help it along.
Though, like I said, if the OP feels like her doctor is not listening to her about her work, her preferences, her needs, then in my opinion thatâs a perfectly fine reason to look for another doctor. Youâre talking about something that will have you in contact with the doctor quite frequently, and something that will take up a major part of your life while youâre dealing with it. If you donât feel like you can communicate comfortably with your doctor, youâre not giving yourself the best chance you can to have the best results.
Going by the folks in the support group my mom goes to, a bit of âdoctor swappingâ to find the right one that you can work with is pretty normal - often itâs within the same group, even, just that different people have a different approach and bedside manner.
(By which I do not mean, btw, that some other doctor might say âoh, okay, go and ride the whole timeâ - but if thereâs a valid reason why the doctor wants you to not do that, LIKE the fungus risk, then the doctor should darn well be willing to take the time to discuss it with you and see if there are any compromises that can be made that satisfy your need for horse contact from time to time without putting you at what the doctor considers to be an unreasonable level of risk.)
Listen to your doctorâŠyou just never know how immunocompromised you will be⊠Iâm a RN in a bone marrow transplant unit. Itâs better to play it safe. The last thing that you need is a nasty infection that you cannot fight off!
Thanks all. I really do like and respect this doctor, and had expressed to her that my health is my #1 priority, career is #2âŠSo I donât think she was out of line if this is whatâs best for me. Itâs sad to know how many other horse woman have faced/are facing this, but at the same time itâs comforting to know there are people who understand. Thanks again for the info and well-wishes.
JINGLES AND HUGS FOR YOU ``
JINGLES AND HUGS FOR YOU DURING YOUR TREATMENT AND RECOVERY `
JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE & AO ~ ALWAYS OPTIMISTIC ``
Vandy, jingles jingles jingles. I had a single mast last Jan, but not chemo, so I can only address the surgery part. I was back on a horse in 12 days just to prove I could! Made my trainer take a picture. I will try to find it and link to it.
The best advice I can give you for the surgery is take arnica starting I think about five days before. You can research this. I had no pain at all and minimal swelling. They let me out of the hospital the next day.
As far as your doctor, I sort of know what you mean. My oncologist got me all upset after my bone scan, which shows some bone density issues. She looked at me sternly and said âyou mean youâre still riding?â. That made me mad. Of course I am still riding. I just try to be safe. The doctors can get so dang bossy and conservative. There are times to take them with a grain of salt, or more literally, with your own judgment and quality of life needs as your guide.
Keep us posted!!!
This is really what I mean by sometimes needing to doctor shop - itâs MUCH better if you can find a doctor who is willing to listen to you and what you want and need to have good quality of life and try to work WITH you to come to suitable compromises than it is to have a doctor who makes all sorts of rules that just arenât realistic for you and then you go and break them - because any given rule might be the doctor being overly conservative, or it may be a real and valid concern.
More and more itâs becoming quite clear to doctors treating people with all kinds of chronic health issues (including cancers) that quality of life is a CRITICAL element in how well the patient does overall. Some changes are, of course, unavoidable, particularly in the short term after surgery or during a course of treatment that has certain side effects, but generally the attitude is becoming more that itâs best to try to allow the patient to keep as ânormalâ a life as possible.
The trick is having a doctor who you can communicate with and who is willing to understand why something that might seem like no big deal to her is a major issue for you when it comes to your mental and emotional well-being.
(Like I said, one of the reasons my mom switched doctors - even though the one she was seeing originally was a very good medical practitioner - was that he really couldnât understand why she wanted to try and see if she could keep working. My mom is like one of those OTTBs who goes nuts if you donât give it something to do - she NEEDS some kind of job to keep her brain going and give her something to focus on. Her current doctor did a much better job of understanding that, and while he cautioned her that at some point she might not feel up to working, or may have to work from home due to the condition of her immune system, he was willing to work WITH her to let her figure out how much she could do on her terms, once heâd laid out the safety concerns. Even just the fact that he was willing to have that conversation made a big difference on her mental state.)
Been there, done that and carried as normal with the horses. It will largely depend on your body and how YOU tolerate the treatment. I found that the horses provide you with comfort and security, which is a very worthwhile thing. (somehow they know youâre not well) Luckily my doctor recognized this fact and said, listen to your body and be careful.
I have a friend whom went on a ten day trailride four days after her mastectomy and did just fine. She is one tough lady. This woman also was instrumental in giving surgery a nd kemo advice to myhubby when HE was diagnosed with breast cancer had complete left side mastectomy and kemo.
The best advice she gave is talk to the oncologist about anti-dausia drugs and start taking them the evening before kemo and for at least three days after kemo. My hubby did this and never got sick.
She didnât nor did he let the cancer rule them THEY ruled the cancer and did what they wanted when they wanted. Both also had shots of the neulasta
drug the day after each treatment wich helped with the blood counts.
it is also importantant to never eat off a buffet table while undergoing kemo treatments too many germs. if your counts are ok and you feel up to I personally see no reason why you canât resume horses while undergoing kemo. Doc may have a concern that with counts low you could faint or pick up bacteria from the horse/or barn.
First and formost is TALK TO YOUR DOC.
[QUOTE=gdolapp;5455490]
it is also importantant to never eat off a buffet table while undergoing kemo treatments too many germs.[/QUOTE]
Oh, itâs not horse-related, but this buffet table point is a very good one. My mom was on chemo over the holidays, and a lot of holiday parties do have some kind of buffet, so the way she coped was weâd get there early and Iâd keep an eagle eye out and as SOON as the food was set out Iâd go and get some for her, so I was the first person (besides the cooks) to get to it. Not ideal, but at least it hadnât had a whole parade of people sneezing on it for half an hour. She normally got enough that way that she could eat politely (you know, small amounts, making the plate last) for the time we were at the party and then she might have something at home. (Or have had something before we went, depending on timing.)
But it avoided that awkward sitting there without eating ANYTHING thing where people then come up and ask intrusive questions or assume youâre on a diet or get offended.
My mom has also had relatively bad luck with lettuce/salad mixes. I think theyâre just really hard to clean well, unless you do it yourself and are very careful, so she tends to avoid stuff like that. (Itâs never made her horribly sick, but a couple of stomach upset incidents were enough to make her go ânot worth the risk.â)
Also, be prepared for the chemo drugs to potentially have REALLY WEIRD side effects. The one my mom is on does bizarre things to her taste buds - the first three weeks she was on it she had a horrible time finding things to eat because nothing tasted right at all.
So just keep that in mind - you might have to change you eating habits even if you donât have a lot of trouble with nausea as such. In theory your oncologist should also have a nutritionist or someone who functions in that role as part of his team, but to be honest theyâre not always that useful unless you can ask REALLY specific questions. (They sort of have generic info they hand out to everyone, and they get into certain habits about what works for MOST patients, so you have to remind them you have unique problems. Like my mom is lactose intolerant, so a milk-based meal replacement shake is not going to do her a heck of a lot of good!)
Also, depending on the chemo drug, you may want to look online a little and see if anyone else has figured out any tricks to make it more tolerable - for example, the one I take for my arthritis (lower dose than for cancer treatment) is methotrexate which can cause sort of weird not-quite-nausea stomach pain. (Itâs very odd, hard to describe.) After being on it for a while, I discovered that if I take it after a decent meal (like, meat and potatoes, not a salad) and then go easy on acidic or spicy foods for the next 24 hours or so, it minimizes the symptoms a lot. Other people have reported noticing the same thing.
(Again, this is at lower doses, so I donât know how well it would work if you were actually taking it specifically for chemotherapy, but I imagine similar discoveries have been made about other things where there is a âtrickâ to what you eat or when you eat it.)
And, to drag this back to the horse related realm:
If you do get the okay to do stuff with horses from your doctor, Iâd still try to limit the following:
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Anything involving close contact with fungus or feces. Get someone else to check hay bales to see if theyâre fresh, clean stalls, and pick out hooves if you possibly can. (Particularly picking out hooves, 'cause youâre right down there pretty close and picking them out makes particles airborne, so you can breathe them in⊠Ew, right?)
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Buy a supply of gloves suitable for the tasks youâre doing. (Dishwashing gloves, hospital-type latex or nitrile gloves, whatever.) Keeping your hands clean goes a long way to minimizing infection spread, but washing them all the time is hard on the skin. (And the drugs for the cancer may also make your skin do weird things - my momâs hands looked like lizard skin, they got so dry.) So where possible you want to be able to put on gloves instead of having to constantly wash your hands or sanitize them.
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That said - have one of those little things of hand sanitizer with you (Target has ones that you can clip on to a bag for cheap and the bottle is refillable) for those moments when you donât have gloves or canât wear them, but you know something is probably germy. (Like when the person before you in line coughs right as theyâre using the keypad on the credit card machine. Ick.)
First off, Iâm so sorry that you have to go through this. I know the shock and disbelief you must be feeling. My aunt has her mastectomy scheduled for this Thursday, and I had a double m and did chemo last fall-winter.
I took six weeks off from riding after my surgery, which is what my doctor recommended to allow my body to heal from the surgery. I still was encouraged to go visit the horses, though, which I did.
After healing from the mastectomy, I rode practically every day of my treatment, except for the three days following each infusion when I just felt a little tired and like I shouldnât push it. My doctor actually recommended that I ride and encouraged me to get as much exercise and to be outside as much as possible. She was of the opinion that mental well-being promotes physical healing. I never got sick throughout my treatments, never had a bad reaction, and made it through much more easily than I expected. I did take precautions: I wore dust a dust mask while grooming and tacking up and I washed my hands religiously and was careful to keep dirty hands away from my mouth and eyes. I really think riding helped keep me sane last winter when everything else seemed out of control.
I met with three doctors to discuss what their treatment would be, and each one had a slightly different take on how they would proceed with the chemo regimen. Perhaps a second opinion for treatment AND riding is in order? Ultimately the choices in all of this are up to you. Get as educated as possible, and make the best decisions that you can with the information youâre given. On a happier note, my hair has grown back, and life goes onâŠtry to remember this as you face the next few weeks! Big hug, and feel free to PM me if you have more questions.
Oh, and one more thing. These things, the Buff head wrap:
https://www.kitshack.com/catalog/index.php/cPath/52
are the greatest for riding and day-to-day baldness. Theyâre a stretchy fabric tube made of a breathable material thatâs warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Theyâre super easy to throw on your head, and they stay put, unlike regular bandanas. I wore them to ride under my helmet but also every day out and about. Loved them! (well, as much as anyone can love something for the side effects of chemo!)
