Modifications for a female recently post breast cancer treatment
Kind of a long shot, but I've seen a couple mentions of women in similar situations on the forum, so I figured I'd post something and see what you folks think. My wife recently completed most of her treatment for breast cancer. She had a great result (complete response) and expressed interest in taking her lifting more seriously now that it's largely over. Having done SS in the past, and having had good results, I figured that was a good place to start. She had been lifting though treatment, but only had access to 15-50lb dumbbells, so it was more haphazard (lots of increasing volume, until she was ready to make the 10lb jumps, different exercise selection, etc).
Now we're both doing SS together, and I'm trying to help her as much as I can, but I am by no means an expert, having done the program once 10 years ago, read (and now rereading) the blue book, and otherwise spending a handful of years here and there in the gym.
The situation is as follows. Chemo, radiation, and bilateral mastectomy are complete, and largely recovered from, with a few lingering affects. She's still on a PD-1 inhibitor through the end of January though. The cumulative effects of this seem to be causing some mild adrenal dysfunction (evident in bloodwork, not just guessing based on symptoms), which I suspect may be limiting her ability to recover from workout to workout. It is also necessary for her to take 5 days off every 3rd week, surrounding the day where she gets her infusion. If she does anything more intense than yoga within that window, she gets debilitating muscle soreness.
We're now about 1.5 months into the program, and at a point where she's hitting a wall on everything but squats which she's doing 5s on still, everything else is 3s. Been through a reset on squats, bench, and DL already at varying times, but never everything at once. Could it be that she's at the limit of her recovery capacity, albeit artificially low due to circumstance? What would that look like? Any modification in order, or just reset weights and keep pushing? Stats below
31 yr old female
118lbs, 5'1"
s-125 3x5
b- 67.5 5x3
dl- 145 5x3
p- 52.5 5x3
pc- 45 (trying to get form down before adding weight)
Apologies for the small novel, just trying to get any relevant information I can think of in there. Any help is appreciated.