As many as one in five survivors of breast cancer suffer the distressing, debilitating and often heartbreaking effects of lymphoedema.*The National Breast and Ovarian Cancer Centre (Cancer Australia)

Patients treated for cancer where the lymph nodes are removed or damaged during therapy can find a life threatening illness replaced with a life-long, painful and debilitating condition.

Lymphoedema can lead to regular hospitalisation due to infections and have devastating, ongoing effects on both the physical and emotional wellbeing of patients.

If diagnosed and treated early, this distressing and debilitating upper limb swelling can be controlled and reduced with specialist therapy treatment, compression sleeves and pressure bandages.

Unfortunately, they look like bandages causing people to ask ‘What’s wrong with your arm?’. This affects a woman’s already low self esteem.

Once we realised this, Slinky Sleeves  researched with lymphoedema therapists to make a size of fashion sleeves to cover compression sleeves.

As everybody’s arms are different and only one arm is usually affected it proved a challenge to develop a standard ‘compression sleeve’ size.  The next step has been to develop our fashion shrug with adjustable cuffs, which isn’t as size sensitive and much easier to fit clients.