Steroids with Chemo: What is your experience?

I'm glad to hear the treatment is helping. Perhaps the new strength you feel is your body not having to fight the cancer as much as it was? (Just guessing)

If you're comfortable sharing, is your cancer castrate-sensitive or castrate-resistant? My bone-metastatic cancer is still castrate-sensitive, so we've been managing it without chemo, but I know there's a new trend to give chemo proactively for a 1-2-3 punch.

Yes my cancer is equivalent to chemical castration. I had my fun in my youth with love making. My wife and me have been married for 33 years. we love each other very much but having sex pretty quicky became not the main concern in our relationship. I know it was problematic a time but we survived it and now in our older age we laugh about it because we don't have that much to miss, even more now(my wife is a breast cancer survivor stage 3 C). Sometimes a curse is a blessing in disguise.

The dexamethasone is given to suppress side effects of the chemo. It is very common for it to make patients feel energized and optimistic. Unfortunately, those positive effects diminish after a few days. Good luck with your treatments.

thank you Lag: I will take these few days of feeling great any time my friend and I'll enjoy them to the fullest; then "que sera,sera..."

Thanks, and I understand what you mean. 🙂

That said, "castrate-sensitive" means that hormone therapy alone can still keep your cancer under control (PSA close to 0), while "castrate-resistant" means that it cannot (PSA still rising). I was curious whether you got chemotherapy because your PCa has become castrate-resistant, or whether the chemo was just proactive.

My wife has GBM. They use the corticosteroids to fight inflammation and suppress your immune system. The steroids manufacture cortisol. This rush is the extra cortisol the steroids are manufacturing. It takes some time usually a coupe of weeks for your body to adjust. What will happen is your body will shutdown production of cortisol because it no longer needs it. The cortisol rush can cause other issues. Lack of sleep, Moon face, increased blood sugar. Its not a good thing. In addition , once your body has stopped producing cortisol you taper very slowly to get off the steroids. To quickly and your body will have increased pain and discomfort. So while good up front its not your friend. Google corticosteroids and cortisol. Lots of information.

My cancer is metastatic and as of 04/15/24 it had moved to my bones. Now the psa is almost 0 with the help of the 2 therapies. Chemo is going hopefully to take of cancer cells made have found a way to develop using something else than hormones. I think that is what going on in my case; any way the doctor told me; no cure for you.

Thank you for your answer. I need to take the steroids for 3 days every 3 weeks for 5 months. I hope it will help me support the chemotherapy better .

perfect the 3 days on 4 days off should keep your body from shutting down cortisol. That has been a nightmare for my wife. Good luck.

It sounds like it might be castrate-resistant, then (my cancer is also metastatic to the bones, but castrate-sensitive, so my PSA is staying < 0.01 without chemo).

In your case, as far as I understand as a layperson, chemo at for castrate-resistant PCa is a mainstream treatment. I was just curious, for my own sake, whether you and your care team were experimenting on the cutting edge by using chemo on PCa that was still castrate-sensitive.

Thank you for sharing the information, and best of luck!