By Susan Okula
It was a most unwelcome journey, but one she had to take. Lynda Plaisted spent a year fighting breast cancer with surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Even after her treatment was completed, Lynda’s trek was not over. The Annapolis Dragon Boat Club became her pathway to emotional healing.
“It’s my second family,” Lynda says about club members. “They are my friends and so caring.”
Lynda was diagnosed with invasive lobular carcinoma, stage 3c, in the summer of 2016. She had a lumpectomy and two lymphadenectomies where surgeons removed lymph nodes – a total of 19 – with cancer cells. She also underwent chemotherapy, strong enough to cause significant neuropathy – loss of feeling – in her hands and feet.
The chemotherapy also heightened Lynda’s chances of developing permanent lymphedema, which happens when lymph fluid collects in the arm or other parts of the body and does not properly drain, causing pain and swelling. Determined to do all that she could to prevent the cancer from ever coming back, Lynda rejected her doctors’ offer to take a chemotherapy break.
Sixteen months after her last treatment, Lynda was cancer-free. But she will live with lymphedema the rest of her life.
“Every day I deal with pain. My arm can get pretty swollen,” Lynda reports. However, she keeps the swelling and pain at bay with dragon boating.
“At first I was hesitant to join the team, thinking that paddling would increase my arm pain,” she says. “But I have experienced significant pain relief as a direct result of the regular exercise and paddling motion.”
Lynda, a mother of three and grandmother of six, has met many club members who are breast cancer survivors and deeply understand her cancer journey. She is a member of the ADBC breast cancer team that competed along with 128 other teams from around the world in the IBCPC Dragon Boat Festival in Florence, Italy, in July of 2018.
“Outside of childbearing, for me there has been no other high like it” Lynda says, describing the feeling of competing in Italy and bonding with her teammates.
“I feel that I have been truly blessed getting to know everyone in this club,” Lynda says. “This is an amazing group of women and men, and I am happier and healthier because of it.”
