lymph nodes removed from both sides

Hi, Purplemom, and welcome,

I hope you're recovering well from your surgery, and I'm sorry about this new worry. The quick answer is that you're definitely at risk for lymphedema on both sides. But what to do about that is harder to answer. If you want to continue to use arms for blood pressure, injections, IVs and blood draws, then you have a couple of choices. Either use your left arm since it has the fewest number of nodes removed (slightly lower risk of lymphedema than the other, possibly), or use the non-dominant arm (which hopefully is your left also) since lymphedema is somewhat easier to cope with in the non-dominant side.

And on the other hand, since these are YOUR arms and lymphedema is for the rest of your life, you might want to not let them use either arm. In that case you'd use your feet for blood draws, calfs for blood pressure, hip or thigh for injection, and foot or neck (sounds worse than it is!) for IVs. There are few medical providers who will accommodate you in that without at least rolling their eyes, but more likely arguing. If you have had trouble with blood clots in the past, that might be a good argument not to use a foot. Otherwise it's up to you to decide how you want to proceed, and then to politely but firmly stick to it. One argument that we sometimes hear is that there are no studies that show avoiding using your arms will prevent lymphedema. That's actually true--there are no such studies. And there are none that show it's safe to use the arms either. But there is plenty of clinical evidence linking arm trauma to both lymphedema development and cellulitis in an at-risk limb. 

Your call, unfortunately. There are women here who have chosen to use one at-risk arm, others who have chosen to restrict use of both arms. Whatever you decide, I hope you'll be able to skip our Sorority of Swell entirely!

Be well!
Binney

I've had some success, but not always. If your doctor will write on the blood draw order "foot draw only", it might help. Some labs still won't do it. As far as BPs go, I really don't think it needs to be taken everytime by every doctor. Sometimes I ask them to skip it if they can't take it in my leg. They'll often skip it. Not sure what I'll do as I grow older and develop more medical problems(perhaps my BP will become high/low).