While she was still recovering from her mastectomy surgery, Bates admitted to becoming angry after realising she had lymphedema.
She told SurvivorNet: “When I woke up, I immediately felt something strange, a kind of tingling in my left arm.
“I went berserk. I left the examining room and ran out of the building. I still had my drains in, I was holding a pillow to my t*ts, and I thought, ‘What am I doing? It’s July, I’m standing out here, it’s hot, I’m still healing, I don’t want to hurt anything.’
“I was mad as hell. I think it was the culmination of having been through cancer twice and realising that now I’d have this condition, this life-long souvenir.