Mets to spine

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gadowo
gadowo Member Posts: 2
edited December 2019 in Stage IV/Metastatic Breast Cancer ONLY

While checking a bone met to rib, the PETscan revealed a mass on my spine. Sent straight to ER and a 7 hour surgery in 2 days, with spinal fusion! The met diagnosis was bad enough but this surgery added a new dimension before I could even start any other treatments!

Anyway, healed enough from surgery and starting rads to spine, plus on Letrozole. Onc mentioned Ibrance for later? I had stage 3 16 years ago! Until back pains that came and went, no terrible spine symptoms warned me tho was pressing on spinal cord! (Hence the emergency surgery!Now on to treat all the other bone Mets too(sigh).

any advice about treatments?

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  • pajim
    pajim Member Posts: 2,785
    edited December 2019

    Hi Gadwo, I was right there where you are but it was seven years ago. Heavens it's been so long since the spinal fusion! And I've been lucky to have zero problems with it (no pain, no movement problems).

    They normally do rads to spine if they operate. Rads to any bone if they operate apparently (I've just had rads to both femurs).

    You have a zillion treatment options. Letrozole alone is OK. Letrozole plus Ibrance is better. There is also the strategy that my MO and I employed. Took letrozole and when it started to fail we added Ibrance. Ibrance wasn't on the market when I started with all this. And it kept letrozole going for an additional year. No idea whether that will work any better than the other two choices.

    You might ask your MO his or her reasoning for letrozole alone.

    There are definitely more side-effects if you include Ibrance. Another thought is that if it's been 16 years obviously you don't have a very aggressive cancer so letrozole alone might do the job for quite a while.

    I wish you the very best of luck whichever you decide.

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  • Daylightdancer666
    Daylightdancer666 Member Posts: 50
    edited December 2019

    Hi I've had rads to lumber and thoeasic helped pain wise but now struggling with crushed vertebrae I had pathological fracture I did not know about sk ce diagnosis in gong to be pushed to spinal about crushed vertebrae as the pain is rediclous x




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