Has anyone here had experience of training at a reasonable level, or returned to a reasonable level of fitness during or post cancer treatment, e.g. chemotherapy and immunotherapy? Or experiences of getting back to a good level of fitness post major cancer surgery?
Most resources I’m finding online are aimed at very easy returns to activity in the short period post surgery, or for those who don’t have a high level of fitness prior to diagnosis. Im also finding medical staff are used to dealing with patients with a less active lifestyle so advice is not always relevant to my situation.
Any experiences or advice on where to find relevant resources would be appreciated.
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I can’t give you any advice Tony, but I wish you complete success.
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Man I’m sorry to hear that. The first and most important thing is that everyone’s cancer experience is different, so there’s no one size fits all. I wasn’t even remotely athletic before my cancer, it’s something I came to after my treatment so I have no advice to offer about coping with the anxiety of losing fitness. Only thing I can say is listen to your health care pros like you would your coach, beating cancer is your training goal at the moment.
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I had surgery for stage 2 bowel cancer some years ago, losing a chunk of colon. Clean removal, clear lymph nodes so no need for chemo and fortunately no need for a colonostomy.
I was part of a trial where they used a very high energy pre-op and post-op diet supplement to improve recovery. My recovery went very well, I was basically back on the bike as soon as the stitches allowed.
It might be worth asking your doctors whether this is still a thing. N= 1 and all that, so I can’t know whether it was the supplement, general fitness or some combination of the two but I had a gut (!) feeling that the high energy thing worked better because my system was used to higher energy inputs and outputs.
Best of luck with your treatment and don’t let any prognosis get you down: post-op I was given a 5 year survival chance of about 30 percent: yet here I still am.
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Thanks for the reply. I had surgeries in January and March and started chemo and immunotherapy start of May. I’ve been back on the bike for a while riding most days, just shorter and easier than before. Fitness has been slowly improving but now feeling like the improvements have stalled a bit and can’t help but feel like I’m missing something that I could be doing better training wise. I will ask the oncologist next time I’m there about supplements. I did have part of a lung removed so breathing and cardio fitness is where I’m having issues as well as energy depletion from the treatments. Thanks again for taking the time to respond