Numbness and nerve pain after breast surgery

Cancer Research UK says you might have numbness, tingling or a shooting pain in the armpit, upper arm, shoulder or chest wall from damage to nerves during surgery, that the nerves usually repair themselves but it can take many weeks or months, and that medicines can help with nerve pain. The size of the problem comes from a Danish national survey: of 3,253 women aged 18 to 70 who answered a questionnaire a median of 26 months after surgery and adjuvant treatment, 1,543 (47 percent) reported pain in the treated area, 201 of them severe; the odds of sensory disturbance were about five times higher after axillary lymph node dissection than after sentinel lymph node dissection (odds ratio 4.97, 95 percent CI 3.92 to 6.30) and five times higher in women aged 18 to 39; and only about 1 in 5 of those in pain had contacted a doctor about it in the previous three months. A reconstructed breast or a spared nipple has little or no sensation, which is a different question from how it looks and worth asking separately. This is orientation from public patient pages, guidelines and the trials themselves, not advice for your case: your own team's instructions and 24-hour number come first, and no figure on this page is a prediction about you.