Dumping tamoxifen?

Why does T feel like poison to you? I'm hoping / believing it to be the opposite- a potential life saver. Potential. Or certainly helping to buy time....(but most of all hoping it's just redundant!)

Tamoxifen has been proven to save lives and has less dramatic problems with it than aspirin. Give it a chance. Most side effects, if you have them, settle down. Everything is a poison in the right dose. Often dose is what determines something as medicinal or poisonous. Because most alternative medicinals have not been clinically studied, they could also do more harm than good. High doses of Vit. C.....cancer cells like that too. Esseiac tea actually stimulated breast cancer cells in vitro. Other things are just plain  useless and expensive...but help the client emotionally...which is ok too. But don't throw away the proven for the unproven. There are snake oil salesmen everywhere but never as many as on the Internet.

Gravol makes a "natural" anti nausea you can buy otc....and it works. Ginger-based. Ginger pills, candied ginger all work as well. It takes almost a year for the effects of radiation to leave...including fatigue...do not give up a med with proven ability to prevent distant recurrences given also you had fairly large tumor and grade 3. Did you have an oncotype done? It also takes a long time for the body to heal from such assaults as mastectomy and radiation. Take short walks....exercise helps fatigue oddly enough. Make sure you have your Vitamin D (at least 1000 units per day), good diet with enough vitamins, especially the B's (I take a complex 50 or 100). I also take melatonin for sleep..that takes a couple of weeks to build up in your system..but ONLY 1 mg/day (too much can cause problems with kidneys)...there are some good tranquillity teas out there too. That "unwellness"...could it be anxiety/depression?

I think saying that Tamoxifen has less dramatic problems than aspirin is a little disingenuous. It's also a little dismissive of someone else's feelings and experience on it. Tamoxifen has some serious side effects in some people and not in others. Side effects also depend on the person taking the medicine. Not everyone experiences the same thing. Sorry, but they don't. Because one person finds her side effects manageable does not negate the fact they may be way more severe and unmanageable for someone else. It does make sense to let some other issues from radiation settle down and see what your side effects from Tamoxifen really are and that might take a few more months. However, if you give it a several more months and are still feeling miserable, you have every right to sit down with your oncologist and discuss what's going on, ask what your options are and not feel bad about it.

I have a friend with an almost identical diagnosis as me who had few very manageable SE's from Tamoxifen. I didn't go on the internet looking to scare myself about Tamoxifen before I took it. Hearing her experience, I totally expected to cruise right through almost SE free. Unfortunately, I got slammed. I kept a journal to record SEs to discuss with my onc because I thought I must be crazy. She told me everyone is different and some people can't have a good QOL with the side effects they get. We discussed that mine were on the severe end. Despite that, I still tried to stick it out for over 18 months to be a good soldier. It never got better and finally had to stop with my one's blessing and my relatively low risk. I wish I didn't have SEs and could have stuck it out. I do not recommend anyone go off it because I did, but I do really get irked when others are so dismissive of what someone else is going through. I felt chronically unwell. It was if my life had been hijacked. People have since come up to me in the last few weeks and told me how much better I look and seem off Tamoxifen. It's noticeable. I feel almost completely like myself - my old pre-cancer self. My only advice is to give it some time but in the end you need to do what works best for YOU.