The First Day of the Next Five Years of My Life

You may recall that the whole reason I had my ovaries out was to enable me to benefit from a relatively new class of drugs called aromatase inhibitors, which help to block estrogen but only work in the postmenopausal setting. (I love being a setting. If someone would just supply a few dramatis personae, we could put on a play!)

Things may change, but the current standard of care is to take aromatase inhibitors for five years.

So the plan was:

1. Have ovaries out.


2. Recuperate.


3. Start aromatase inhibitor.

Pretty simple, right? (OK, so having surgery is not exactly simple. But the plan was fairly basic.)

Of course, in practice the plan became:

1. Have ovaries out.


2. Recuperate.


3. Go on fabulous Pacific Northwest trip to celebrate incredibly handsome husband's quinquennial birthday.


4. Get hit upside the hands, knees, and feet with debilitating joint pain.


5. Spend six weeks trying to wait out/treat/find the cause of joint pain.


6. Start aromatase inhibitor.

Step #5 of the new and not remotely improved plan was added because, well, aromatase inhibitors have their own happy list of side effects, and those include—wouldn't you know it?—joint pain.

<sigh>

MOSWO didn't think I should start the aromatase inhibitor while I was still hobbling around, mainly because hobbling might start to seem like a fond memory if the new drug ended up attacking my joints as assiduously as it did my free-floating estrogen. (It would also introduce another variable into my body's already fraught ecosystem, potentially making it even harder to determine the cause of my troubles.)

So we waited, hoping that the pain would resolve, or that it would be traced to something easily treatable, like Lyme disease.

We all know how well that turned out.

When I found out last week that my joints were likely rebelling against the sudden crackdown on estrogen trafficking, I asked the lovely and kind rheumatologist what he thought about the whole situation.

He didn't hesitate.

Start the aromatase inhibitor right away, he said. Cancer is the main concern, and we've got to come out with our guns blazing. Hit it with everything we've got. [Fill in your favorite battlefield cliché here.]

And the joint pain?

D-14. (My term, of course. Not his.)

In theory, the pain is self-limited, which is another way of saying that it should resolve on its own, without intervention.

That's a good thing, of course, except that self-limited is not necessarily synonymous with short-lived. And, well, short-lived would be nice.

Would have been nice. After six weeks, I think "short" no longer applies.

In any event, I saw MOSWO yesterday, and he concurred with the rheumatologist. (He also concurred with the cancer center's complementary and alternative medicine practitioner, who came to see me the last time I was in for a Herceptin treatment and suggested that I try acupuncture. Stay tuned.)

So I filled the prescription this morning (no insurance issues, I'm happy to report) and popped my first pill today.

Just 1,824 to go.