Is Medicine Helping When it Makes You Want to Die?
I am really trying to be patient with Tamoxifen, but the side effects keep stacking up like cordwood and I feel wrung out. I know there are women who have few side effects or who can mange their side effects well. What I don't understand is why I am not one of them!
The crankiness was one thing. But soon after that started, I became exceedingly forgetful. Those of you who are going through perimenopause may understand. I simply forget what I was thinking, from one moment to the next. For example, on Christmas Day I called Kathy over before we left, to ask if she brought the paperwork for the car we were giving away. As soon as she walked over to the car, I forgot what I wanted to ask. All I knew was that it was important. I had to spend several minutes going through every possibility of what I might have wanted to ask her before I remembered. That time I remembered eventually, but often, I don't!
Having always had a good memory and being someone who juggles many things in my head at once, I find this very disturbing. Unfortunately, it is happening all the time. If I'm not forgetting things, then my mind is going blank for periods of time during the day. Trust me, my mind never went blank before. (It might be a good thing if it did, given how do over-think things, but right now it just feels wrong.)
On top of that, I've started to get confused when driving streets that I drive down all the time. Suddenly, I'm not positive where to turn. What the heck is THAT about?
The list of side effects goes on from there (I'll spare you many of them) but perhaps the worst one is the anxiety. This is the most debilitating of anything. I am now being awaked in the middle of the night, anxious and with my heart racing. It takes hours to get back to sleep and the entire time I feel panicked. I am having anxiety attacks during the day, too, over just about anything and everything. I have had to cancel appointments, back out of commitments, and generally retreat from obligation while crippled by these episodes. I'll be curled up on the sofa, rocking back and forth, over the strangest things. It's even hard to write about.
A lot of these symptoms are what some women go through during menopause, but I do want to point out that Tamoxifen is not making me menopausal. I am still producing the same (or possibly even higher) levels of estrogen as before, it's just that Tamoxifen is blocking absorption by some estrogen receptors. The literature talks about breast tissue, but it seems to me that Tamoxifen must be blocking estrogen receptors elsewhere in order to cause these effects. I guess it's the luck of the draw that I am having such a dramatic response.
I am trying very hard to be patient with this, but if I can't find a solution for the anxiety and the edginess, I'm not going to be able to continue taking this drug. As important as it is to reducing my chance of cancer recurrence, I must have some quality of life. Maybe my oncologist will have some ideas.
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