Narrator: Why do I have so much pain after my cancer treatment?
Julie Silver, MD: The pain can be due to a lot of different reasons. Pain can be due to the surgery itself, for sure. Pain can be due to neuropathy for instance from chemotherapy,
there's pain with radiation burns and skin changes. A lot of times people are given medications that help increase the level of blood cells in their body, their white blood cells in particular,
and that can cause a lot of bone pain which can be very severe. That's where most of my pain was, was really terrible bone pain.
Julie Silver, MD (cont.): But pain can come from a lot of different sources. When people are de-conditioned, they can have overuse type pain, for instance like a woman who maybe had
a mastectomy and is favoring one arm a little bit, and then is overusing the other arm, and then all of a sudden develops shoulder problems in the opposite arm, in her good arm.
Tendonitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, so on. And so there's a lot of different reasons why people may develop pain during cancer treatment because your body
is undergoing so many different changes and because cancer treatment is usually so targeted throughout your body rather than just at one specific site.
