Love Your Nodes
Making life easier for our breast cancer patients
My WiSH Charity launched our Love Your Nodes campaign in the July of 2016 in conjunction with the Bury Free Press.
Our aim was to raise £25,000 for a SentiMag machine to help with the removal of lymph nodes for our breast cancer patients.
Every year up to 250 people have breast cancer operations at the West Suffolk Hospital but, for some, this lifesaving surgery comes with a cost due to the difficulty the surgeon faces in removing lymph nodes.
When a patient is diagnosed with breast cancer the surgeon often needs to remove the first lymph node to see if the cancer has spread further. Currently this procedure is undertaken using a blue dye method. This can be problematic as sometimes the dye reaches several nodes or none at all making the surgeons decision tricky and often resulting in the removal of many nodes to insure the targeted first node is definitely removed. While this achieves the result required to ensure that the surgeon can give a correct diagnosis it comes with life changing consequences for many patients.