Stopped taking hormone therapy due to severe depression

your oncotype score should have recurrence rate with or without hormone blocker. Hope this helps

I agree with Ridley - you should have rec'd a referral to someone in psych onc. There could be a nurse practitioner who makes a specialty of this and can prescribe an antidepressant. St John's wort may be OK for certain people but often extra help is needed to regain proper biochemical balance in the brain. Your (talk?) therapist might also have an associate with whom a consultation could be scheduled for medication adjustment.

There are calculators like CancerMath that you can find on line which give survival statistics using various criteria however no tool like that can predict what your individual outcome will be. It is difficult to make decisions having recently gone through so much trauma so be easy on yourself. Come back and let us know how things go.

shelleyzen--What labelle says about the recurrence prediction without tamoxifen is exactly what the MO I saw told me: my oncotype of 12 predicts a recurrence chance of 8% with anti-hormonals and 15-16% without it (predictions based on stage 1 and stage 2 tumors.) Like labelle's MO, mine was totally honest, and concurred with my decision to decline all anti-hormonal therapy, saying that at my age (then 71) and with my stage 1a/grade 1 tumor, my chances without it are still quite good. She and I had also had a frank discussion about how much is known about recurrence among those who never start anti-hormonal therapy or stop it after a while. In short, nothing is known--and she opined that no drug company really wants to fund research that can hurt its bottom line by leading more people to decline or stop taking its product. The business of the pharma industry is to sell more and more drugs, including drugs to counteract or minimize side effects of the first one prescribed, after all!

And kayb is on target about us being partners with our physicians in the decision-making process. I don't know how old your MO is, but he sounds a bit like a relic of an earlier age in medicine, a throwback to the old, paternalistic "doctor knows best" type who believes that patients shouldn't ask questions and should just do as they are told. You might do well to seek a different MO, one who isn't of the "my way or the highway" type who is not open to discussion. Perhaps you can get recommendations from friends who have seen other MO's, or even your primary physician (mine actually gave me an "avoid this MO" recommendation, as well as a very positive recommendation of the one I saw.) Given your situation, you really need a listener and a discussant, not a dictator, as your physician partner! Good luck to you as you move ahead smoothly. TG