Where can I find Aloe (the plant)?

Piffken ~ Why mess with a plant when you can buy 100% aloe vera gel very inexpensively in most drugstores?   I'm all for doing things as naturally as possible, but getting the gel from the plant is messy and a bit of a hassle. 

Another thing that works great on radiated skin is emu oil.  Most natural foods stores or health foods store carry it.  Just be sure to get a brand that's extra refined, with no grittiness to it.  It costs about $15 a bottle and I thought it was even more healing than aloe vera gel, which is what I started out using until someone told me about emu oil.

Good luck with rads!    Deanna  

Every Nurseries sell them if you want the plant.

Or like Ann said fruit and vegetable stores sell them as a big leaf size.

Piffken, where I live (AZ) aloe is a weed, so I used it during rads and it was truly amazing. I've never tried the pure aloe gel, but I know some rad oncs prefer it because if you use the plant and are not careful you could introduce an infection risk. Or at least that's what they say, and I have no way of knowing how much of a risk that is.

If you use a plant, you carefully cut off the edges of the clean leaf (where the prickly part is) and discard them. Then slit the leaf lengthwise and lay it open. The inside has a gel-like consistency that you can scrap off with a clean table knife and rub on your skin. It stains, so I used an undershirt over the gel. It goes on smoothly and is cooling and soothing, but after awhile it stiffens, which feels odd but not uncomfortable. I think it's very protective of the surface of the skin, without being oily. It doesn't take much to cover a large area, so you can put the rest of the leaf into a plastic bag and store it in the frig. When you go to use it next time it will be extra cool and feel terrific. That way, you don't need a new leaf every day. A large leaf will last about a week -- don't know about the smaller ones.

The plants are pretty easy to keep alive indoors, so if you like "exotic" house plants, that's another plus.

Be well!
Binney

You can get one at a plant nursery...we have lots of them in our back yard..

Regarding the use of emu oil: I didn't use it, but I used calendula oil three times a day during my course of treatments, with no problem. It washes off very easily with baby shampoo (my soap of choice during rads), so I always had my skin clean for my treatments. I had no itching and no peeling, for which I was very grateful and surprised, being a fair-skinned redhead. My rads techs mentioned that they could tell that I had been taking really good care of my skin.

On the other hand, maybe I'd have been fine if I hadn't used anything at all -- no way to tell. I briefly considered putting oil on half my breast and nothing on the other half, but I didn't have the nerve

adrienne