 No matter how depleted you may feel, you will regain your strength. Whatever activities you want to return to, you will get there. Gardening, cooking, playing with your children or grandchildren, playing tennis or skiing - you don’t need a mountain to climb, you just need your life!
Always work on stretching any areas that are tight. Surgery and radiation can cause tightness. Keep stretching. That tightness can cause long term postural problems and chronic pain. This is an ongoing task – I still have to work to keep my shoulder and chest from tightening up. I do some stretches every day, and really feel the difference if I don’t.
Once you have good range of motion, begin strengthening muscles that may have gotten weak during treatment. Pay special attention to the muscles that act in opposition to the areas affected by treatment. If your shoulders have a tendency to round from tightness in the chest, keep stretching your chest, but also work to strengthen your upper back. If you’ve had abdominal surgery, strengthen the muscles of your back.
Begin slowly and increase the intensity and duration of your workout slowly. This is a long process. You won’t regain your strength right away. The key is to start. As a friend of mine likes to say, if the most exercise you get in a day is getting out of bed, start there. Get out of bed, and then get back in bed. Now, get out of bed again. You’ve just doubled your exercise for the day.
You might find it useful to keep an exercise log. Improvement is gradual and sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’re really progressing. With a log you can look back and see just how far you’ve come.
When I was finally finished with treatment I knew I needed a goal. I had expected to feel like celebrating – I made through a year of treatment and I wasn’t dead yet! Instead, I felt a little freaked out, a little lost. Focusing on exercise during that time saved me. I had no idea what the future held for me, but I could understand how far I walked or how strong my shoulders were. I was anxious to return to climbing, the one activity I had curtailed. I eventually settled on the idea of climbing Mt. Rainier to raise money for breast cancer research. It was a goal – a good chance to get back into mountaineering, and some idealistic desire to do something useful in the face of this disease. Also, partly, it was a way to combat that feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I trained hard. At first I focused mostly on endurance. I did a lot of cardio – hiking, swimming, and walking. Speed was not important, building my stamina was. I tried to go longer distances even if I was slow. With weight training I also focused on endurance. I would use light weights so I could do more repetitions. I did some exercise most days, but I always took one or two days off every week. Especially when your body is rebuilding, it’s important to give yourself rest days. For more information visit my blog.
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