BRCA2+ Oophorectomy recommended. 37 yo. Short/Long term effects?

ccmarie22

Diagnosed Stage III BC at 26. BRCA2+ ER+ PR- HER2-

Opted for bilateral mastectomy. Took Tamoxifen for 3 years... No recurrences.

I am 37 now, and it is time to think about an Oophorectomy. I have 1 child. I haven't had menopause, and I still have regular (heavy) periods. I am not afraid of the surgery, or downtime. I am mainly afraid of the sexual side effects, weight gain, aging, and long term health issues. I don't think I will be able to do Hormone Replacement Therapy.

Has anyone had a prophylactic oophorectomy? If so, please tell me how bad it is after.

Moderators

Hi Ccmarie22-

Welcome to the community! You might want to try your question in our High Risk for Breast Cancer forum. Lots of members there have undergone prophylactic procedures, and may have some insight and advice for you as you make your decision.

Hope this helps!

The Mods

ravzari

ccmarie22

I haven't had that done yet, as my gyno wants to wait until we get genetic testing results back (I had a BMX for family history, but hadn't had any genetic testing done at the time), but we've gone over the risks and the main one he kept bringing up was the reminder that removal of the ovaries and tubes will result in instant surgically induced menopause.
We've discussed it all before even prior to my BMX, as I've been wanting to just have a hysterectomy and leave my ovaries intact to get away from having to constantly be on Depo-Provera for pretty bad endometriosis; I tend to prefer to have the non-functioning-properly part removed if it's not essential, but insurance requirements and all of that...the oophorectomy always comes up, despite my never mentioning it, because he so often does that in conjunction with a hysterectomy.

If the types of cancer you had had estrogen receptors, that does limit what they can do for hormone therapy (including using natural remedies that are typically soy-estrogen based) without risking recurrences, from what I understood, so that would be something you'd want to discuss with your doctors to see what could be done for your personal situation to minimize the effects of the surgical menopause without upping the risk of a recurrence. Even if you can't do hormone therapy because of that, your doctor should be able to help figure out a plan of what will help to minimize the general side effects of menopause.

My doctor's main concern--general menopause stuff aside--was early bone loss, oddly enough, but he did tell me that that can usually be mitigated by regularly making sure you take calcium/D supplements, which I do anyway as Depo has a black box warning for risk of bone loss.

Just for reference, we're about the same age; I'll be 37 in a few months.

I have had endometriomas removed from my ovaries before, and that surgery wasn't too bad; mine took a bit longer than normal as the 4cm cyst on the left was completely engulfing and entwined with that poor ovary, which came back from pathology as just a benign endometrioma, burst as they were trying to wiggle it out of the incision and they ended up having to widen the incision to all the gross burst cyst bits out. They did both sides at once, and a year and a half later the scars are barely visible. The one on the left, where the big cyst that burst was, is about 4" long, and the one on the right that had a much smaller cyst is only about 2 1/2" long. I was able to return to work after about 4 days, but I did have occasional twinges of pain from the area for a good 8 months (ESPECIALLY if I stretched 'too hard') on and off as the abdominal muscles fully healed.