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One in five women suffer pain and nerve damage following surgery, but a small injection of blue dye may soon spare those with large tumours that same discomfort.
Elizabeth Bang's stockinged arm serves as a daily reminder of her brush with breast cancer nine years ago.
"It just burns and throbs really and at times you have to feel as though you need to put your arm in the air to relieve it" she says.
The swelling is called lymphodema - a major side effect of surgery where the lymph nodes in the armpit are removed just in case the cancer has spread.
Dr Ian Campbell says that one in ten women will get troublesome arm swelling or lymphodema in the long term and at least a further 10%, if not more, will have other side effects such as some degree of pain or sensory nerve damage.
But a technique called sentinel node biopsy can avoid this complication.
Injecting the tumour site with radioactive blue dye isolates the chief sentinel lymph nodes - the only nodes draining the tumour. A heat-seeking radioactrive counter confirms the correct nodes have been found and then they are isolated and removed, leaving the healthy nodes in place.
The technique is used routinely for tiny tumours.
But a new trial led by doctors at Waikato Hospital aims to test it against existing methods on 1,000 New Zealand and Australian patients with much larger tumours.
"This study is comparing the two operations to see what the trade off is... the risk of possible side effects for women who have no lymph nodes involved versus the small risk of a false negative," says Campbell.
Elizabeth Bang wished she had that chance to prevent her lymphodema.
"I haven't let it stop me do things but at times at home I go home and say this jolly arm why do I have to have it."
Two patients have already been recruited for the new trial, both are from the Waikato.
