Hormone Therapy: Turning a Young(ish) Body Old Almost Overnight

 Hot flashes. Mood swings. Joint pain and stiffness. Irritability. Insomnia. Fatigue. Anxiety. Depression. Infertility. Those are some of the side effects of the hormone therapy that I'm on to actively fight against my cancer coming back. In some ways, this has been the hardest part of my treatment. I'm not constantly running from appointment to appointment and the cancer treatment center isn't my second home.

I currently receive Lupron injections every three months.  These injections serve to shut down my ovaries' estrogen production and put me into chemical menopause. I also take an Aromatase inhibitor, which acts like a backup to prevent estrogen conversion in my adrenal glands. The bottom line- NO ESTROGEN zone up in here. (As I'm writing this, I have the chorus of "no flex zone" in my head).

The effects of these hormone treatments is that they have the potential to significantly cut down on my risk of recurrence. My breast cancer fed off of estrogen. By cutting off its food source, we cut off any errant cancer cell's ability to grow in other parts of my body. This is all wonderful.

But, the treatment comes with the side effects I listed up front, and more. I'm also at a greater risk of osteoporosis and heart disease.  It sucks.  The mood issues are the hardest to deal with.  When I first started the Lupron injections and pills, I felt like I was going to come out of my skin with rage and irritability. I didn't feel like myself.  There are days I still don't. My knees felt like the knees of a 90 year old. I've been able to start other medication to help combat the mood swings and irritability.  My body seems to have gotten used to having old knees. 

I'm going to be having surgery soon to finish my reconstruction and to remove my ovaries and tubes.  The ovary and tube removal surgery is called a Bilateral Salpingo-Oophorectomy (BSO). Even after the BSO, I'll need to continue to take my daily aromatase inhibitor pill for the next 5 to 10 years. I may need to start infusions to help keep my bone density up. (Because fertility preservation was not a concern for me, I haven't talked much about the fact that I won't be able to have any more kids. I can't speak to what fertility preservation would have looked like or what the risks would have been. But I recognize how hard, both emotionally and physically, it must be for those who want to have kids in the wake of a diagnosis like this).






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Going Dark- Addressing the Emotional Impact of Cancer

I started radiation treatment on August 13, 2020 and finished on September 17, 2020. At some point, I'll write a post about my experience with radiation.  Today, I want to talk about the toll that cancer takes on mental health.  Breast cancer, or any cancer, is so much more than a pretty, neat ribbon.  It is messy. It causes people and lives to unravel in various ways. Cancer robs you and those around you. That is a fact. My 2 year old son knows the words "cancer, chemo, radiation and surgeries."  He's seen my drains following my mastectomy and thought they were juice packs. My daughter asks when I'll be "done with cancer." I tell her after my next 3 surgeries. The truth is, never.  I know that there are positives, but  I'm allowing myself to share with you the negatives, and be okay with that. It is not always good, sometimes it just is . I don't think I'll ever feel comfortable saying that I'm "cancer free." Unfortunately, we ...
Read more

Bilateral Mastectomy Surgery: Tootaloo Titties

Image
I had my bilateral mastectomy surgery on June 18th. I’ve had this post in draft form since before the surgery, but the emotional weight of it prevented me from finishing it and posting. To be honest, I had a lot more anxiety than I anticipated leading up to the surgery.  I feared I would be a fluke outlier, and have something go wrong and die on the table.  Surprise- I didn’t! Here I am, with my chest and left armpit sore as f*ck, wearing a drain belt for my surgical drains and looking more like a cancer patient than ever. In the spirit of Punk’d, my eyebrows decided to fall out a month after finishing chemo.  I had thought my eyebrows would escape unscathed, but instead, they have jumped ship as the hair on my head works hard on growing in.  As my sister says, you can pencil your eyebrows in, but you can’t do that for your head hair, so I’ll take it.  I had initially wanted to have a Tootaloo Titties send-off party before my surgery, but COVID made that impossi...
Read more