Hi @jeaniebean,
Yesterday, in the "Radiation Therapy for breast cancer: What was your experience?" discussion, you said you "had a terrible experience with anastrozole and tried 3 others, all with same results. I did find I could tolerate the pure one, with a bit more ease. i was allergic to the fillers in all the others."
I know everyone can have different experiences with these treatments, but please tell me which meds were the "3 others". And what was "the pure one" that you could tolerate?
Did the one you could tolerate add to your crippling effects?
Hope your "sort of fine" is really much better than it was.

I agree with your story's assessment of the radiation being "okay" versus the pills being horrible. I had 33 radiation treatments and drove myself to every one, alone. It wasn't that bad. I took Anastrozole for 7 months. Brain fog. Mood swings. Teariness. Excruciating back and joint pain. Blurry vision. Brain fog. Vivid violent nightmares. And then, on 9/15/2022, my left knee blew out. I had been in a clinical trial for osteo-arthritis from its inception until it ceased in 2020 and had had numerous X-rays and MRIs of my fragile (bicycle accident) left knee. You would think that an oncologist---knowing that the aromatase inhibitors stomp out all estrogen in the body and will cause inflammation of injured joints---would not put me on any of the 3 A. I, drugs at all and perhaps go right to Tamoxifen (which I tried for 5 months) but no. When I tried to tell him of the insomnia that I had suffered for weeks because of the joint pain, plus the other side effects, he said, "Don't take it then" and got up and walked out, There was no discussion of the other alternative drugs and no compassion and his official statement (in writing) was, "The only side effect from taking Anastrozole is a little stiffness in your hands and fingers when you wake up first thing in the morning, and it goes away when you quit taking it." He only saw me 2x in 8 months, himself, and the "minions" (P.A.'s) would always say, "You'll need to talk to the doctor face-to-face about that." I was also never given an oncotype, standard of care since 2013, because he had told me (Dec., 2021), when I asked, "You don't need one." As a matter of fact, I DID need one, because it would have been used to plan my treatment and it would have given me a % for recurrence. Anything over 25 usually has chemo. When I finally got my onco score in 2023 from a different oncologist, it was 29 and my % of recurrence is 36%, because I cannot tolerate any of the adjuvant therapy drugs. I had to have 32 ml of an anti-inflammatory and 6 ml of Durolane injected into my fragile left knee and was in a wheelchair for 6 months (September, 2022 until March 2023.)