Welcome to Wellness and Mass. I'm Dr. Nicole Sapphire and Breast Cancer Awareness Month continues.

That's right. It may be October and you look around. You're seeing a lot of pumpkins and pumpkin spice lattes and apple donuts and all of those other beautiful fall things.

You're probably also seeing a lot of pink, especially if you follow my social media. Why is that? Well,

I think we all know at this point, one in eight women will develop breast cancer in their lifetime.

That number is only increasing. We're seeing rising incidences of breast cancer, especially in

younger women. So October is the time where we push our message of early detection matters. The earlier

you find cancer, the easier it is for us to treat and it improves survivability. So get your

mammogram, make sure you're doing your breast checks, all of that stuff. That's what October

is all about for the breast imaging world. But while, yes, we may diagnose over

300,000 new cases of breast cancer in the United States this year alone, today's episode is

talking about something else. Let's talk about the 4 million Americans, women, and men

who are living with a history of breast cancer,

meaning they were just diagnosed and they're undergoing treatment right now,

or they've completed their treatment and they have been declared cancer-free,

or they've completed their treatment, or they're still undergoing treatment because their disease has progressed.

Now, that's a lot of people.

And these are survivors who carry both the triumphs, but also the challenges of this disease forward.

And that's what we're going to focus on on today's episode, because survivorship doesn't always

mean the end of the story. And one of the most under-recognized and under-talked about, but life-altering

complications of treatment from breast cancer is lymphedema, which is a swelling often in the

arm, the breast, the chest, the neck, triggered by treatments that disrupt the lymphatic system.

Estimates vary broadly, but up to 20% of breast cancer survivors may have some level of persistent lymphodema. And it may climb even higher as post-treatment time passes. It is a debilitating condition. You see women walking around. They may be having a sleeve on their arm, a compression sleeve. But even after the cancer is gone, they live with this constant

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