During my journey with Stage 3 triple negative breast cancer, I wanted to incorporate holistic ways of healing on top of the traditional treatment. I did 5 months of chemotherapy, had a double mastectomy with 13 lymph nodes removed on my right side and 5 weeks of radiation. After that was finished I started Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) in a soft chamber which I did daily for 3 months.
HBOT accelerates healing by delivering pure oxygen under increased pressure. This process stimulates the bodies natural repair systems, fostering new blood vessel growth, tissue regeneration and bolstering the immune system.
In a quick explanation it encourages “fast forward healing” in the body.
This can heal a wide variety of conditions but among them is lessening the damage and side effects from chemo and radiation.
After 25 sessions of radiation and doing the HBOT daily for 3 months I can say with assurance that this absolutely helped me heal from radiation. I’m currently going to physical therapy and the therapists cannot believe how amazing my skin looks and how it stretches after radiation. They have told me typically anyone who’s had radiation the skin is stiff and doesn’t stretch like mine does which I have to attribute to the HBOT.
Once I was in remission, after treatment I was put on a low dose chemo pill and immunotherapy for 6 months. Doing the HBOT for 3 months being on this medication helped me to feel better than I should have, and gave me more energy. Once I was fine with the 3 months I noticed a huge dip in my energy and increase in exhaustion.
I have 2 weeks left of that treatment and for the past 2 months have completely lost my taste from the medication. This has been a horrible side effect that makes it hard for me to eat and the Drs have no answers for how to help this just saying “it will improve when the meds are done. Just eat what you can” which as you can imagine- is not very helpful.
I have now started doing the HBOT but in a hard chamber. The hard chamber brings you to an even higher atmospheric pressure which delivers even more pure oxygen to your body- 5x more oxygen then the soft chamber which increases the healing exponentially. I’m excited to see how quickly this will help me with these side effects. They also have a protocol for surgery so I will be doing that before and after my reconstructive surgery which my Dr agrees will absolutely help with my healing.
HBOT can treat so many things other things as well- strokes, heart attacks, infections, burns, wounds that won’t heal, diabetes, toxins and poisoning, MS, and AIDS to name a few.
This is one of the most underused tools we have in the medical community so I wanted to share my success with this so other breast cancer patients/ survivors are aware of this additional healing tool.
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