This doctor's personal choices

[orthodoc]

I'm quitting hormonal therapy for my breast cancer. I fought through surgery and chemo and all they did to me and took from me, but 10+ years on this hormonal chemo is a tradeoff I'm not willing to make.

I haven't had a day of 'normal' temperature since starting hormonal 'therapy'. With tamoxifen, it was endless drenching hot flashes. They drenched my clothes, including my heavy cotton lab coat. All of it, soaked. Not all right when it'd happen predictably at 0800, before the first patient came in. Arimidex gives me a twofer: hot flashes AND cold chills. Not an improvement. Worse, Arimidex gives me suicidal depression and joint pain so bad that I can barely walk.

Tamoxifen raises my chance of blood clots and cataracts, plus some retinal destruction and depression. Arimidex raises my chances of osteoporosis-induced fractures, severe joint pain, arthritis (permanent damage as opposed to subjective pain), severe depression, headaches.

I already have spread, and these drugs aren't likely to do much about that. Exercise and soy have been shown to do more, so I'm going to go with those.

I hope that, after a few weeks (Arimidex has a ridiculously long half-life), my joint pain will decrease to where I can walk without a limp and actually be able to do what I need to do in the day. I hope that I'll go back to having some more or less normal thermoregulation. I hope that my risk of cataracts and further eye damage will retreat to baseline.

Some things aren't worth living with. I already have the damned cancer. I refuse to have the rest of my life made unbearable by medications that stand only a small chance of prolonging my life (and that's a population statistic that means nothing to the individual).

That's my choice. I'd rather have ten good years without this joint pain and depression than have twenty miserable, quasi-suicidal years. I want to dance, want to waltz and tango and listen to jazz and hike and ride horses again.