breathlessness

Morning Lulu  /  lulupop

Breathlessness is a fairly common chemo side effect as a lot of red blood cells get damaged when you go through your sessions and it takes a while to replace them. You should mention the breathlessness to your breast care nurse or onco unit as it is one of the symptoms of a blood clot, but that is the worse case scenario.

A simple blood test would find out if this is down to having a low red blood cell count - so there isn't as much oxygen getting around your body meaning you have to breathe more to make up for the shortfall.

If you don't normally suffer from asthma, copd or have some form of chest infection going on, a low red cell count is mostly the cause but do get this checked out.  Don't know if one of your chemo drugs was cyclophosphamide but that can have breathlessness as a common side effect and it can take a good few months post chemo for the drugs used to fully clear your system and rebuild damaged normal cells.

As for the watery eyes; strangely enough this is mostly down to having dry eyes and your tear ducts overreact to this producing too many tears which dilutes your tears natural lubrication.

Don't know what eye drops your were given but one of the better types is Systane Ultra if you can get this prescribed brilliant as it is around £8 - £10 a bottle. The chemo can close the tiny tear drain hole in the corner of your eyes and with having no or few lashes it makes the watering seem worse.

Hope this is of some help, G n' J

Hi 

Thank you for your quick response I will get it checked out next week.