Is joint pain with Exemestane permanent, even after stopping?

Have you tried staying off of it for a month? The exemestane side effects are supposed to subside when you stop taking it but maybe you did not take long enough brake. But I personally think your symptoms are from Zoladex. If side effects are too much you can stop Zoladex and just take tamoxifen. I had to have oophorectomy because of brca+ and my hands kept going numb at night and whenever I tried to grip something. Is your ring finger the one most numb?

Even after months still have some leg pain . It takes a long time.

I went from Aromasin to Arimidex to Femara with 1 to 2 months pause between them due to extreme pain. Now I'm disabled. What you need to think about is that the term "pain" doesn't mean that the aromatase inhibitor somehow affects your nerves to send pain signals to the brain where there is no cause for pain. On the contrary. Being on an aromatase inhibitor is like going through menopause in fast forward, with all the changes menopause brings to our bodies happening faster - osteoporosis, sagging skin, degenerative processes, aging in general. The estrogen HAS a reason to be in our body, and it's not just related to being able to have babies or not. It's also regulating a lot of other things in our bodies. Estrogen depletion causes degenerative changes at the joint level - it doesn't really matter which joint, they will be all affected, but depending mostly on your weight and main occupation, you will feel it worse in the joints that are most under "wear". Those will have the "tear". Right now I am disabled, and one of the causes of my disability was rapidly advancing osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis is a degenerative disease, the disease of old age. My spine doctor told me in the very beginning (about 3 + years ago) that if he hadn't seen me he would have thought he looks at the Xrays of a 80+ years old. I was 50 at the time

Not everybody reacts the same to the AI. Some are more affected than others. Nobody can tell you ahead of time how your body will react. I know ladies who breezed through the 5 years of AIs with minimal discomfort, and a couple ladies like me, who got the absolutely shortest end of the stick in the process.

Another reason we experience more pain on AIs is because estrogen cushions our bodies from feeling pain. The loss of estrogen caused by the AIs allows pain to surface where it had been subdued before.

Remember when we thought men were such babies when it came to complaining about pain? Now we know why.

I saw this thread and wanted to say that I have been off exemestane for 2 months and I can finally put some rings on my fingers. It took a full two months for the swelling in my knuckles to go down. But here I am wearing rings again! (My hips keep making popping sounds, but generally I am feeling SO MUCH better).