← Return to Aromatase Inhibitors: Did you decide to go on them or not?

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@vivi1

I took tamoxifen for 4 months and stopped due to SEs, both joint pain, including horrific night leg cramps, and fear of the more serious possibilities that come post menopausal. I am not sure if I will be able to tolerate an AI, and I rather doubt it, but I am going to try them. My osteopenia is not severe, so I am hoping I can keep osteoporosis at bay with supplements and exercise. Are you familiar with the online prediction tools ?: https://www.tuftsmedicalcenter.org/ibtr/
which shows the benefits of both radiation and hormone therapy, and https://breast.predict.nhs.uk/tool
Given their toxicities, I too wish there was a way to determine who truly needs to take a hormone blocker, but since there is not yet a dependable blood test to detect distant cancer cells, all estrogen positive BC patients are prescribed them. I feel scared into submission for the time being.

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Replies to "I took tamoxifen for 4 months and stopped due to SEs, both joint pain, including horrific..."

I hope you don't feel scared into submission for long and I have confidence that you are not and cannot be :-).
But maybe between a rock and a hard place on bad days and feeling all of this is too much to have to absorb?
This whole BC saga has been both unexpected and enlightening for me. Unexpected because no one in my family, out to first cousins, has had cancer except for my father's death from prostate cancer at age 86.
But the enlightening element comes from the mental discipline it requires for me to keep a productive focus. I'm a realist and, while I'd like to be hard-wired for optimism, I'm not so denial isn't my fallback coping mechanism. But a mathematician friend reminded me that a risk of say 10% for some event to recur is, concurrently, just as validly, a 'risk' of 90% that it won't. The 'odds for' are alarming in this case of breast cancer recurrence because that would be a terrible dreaded event coming true So the 10% can overwhelm us but it helps to remember that the odds against are also equally valid numbers and qay bigger . Or at least it helped when my math prof friend pointed out that '90% against' needs to have some weight in one's logic. And Is helpful to remember while also doing everything reasonable and likely to try to increase the odds against.
This is helps me feel like it's worth the effort to work at the variables we can tweak (healthier diet, weight-bearing exercises and creative outlets) which help one feel empowered enough (as are we all) to make choices that feel right for me. And change course when better ones arise.