Total estrogens came back VERY high

andrearose,

I agree completely with melissadallas. I understand your anxiety about this is very real to you, but try not to encourage it by trying to read more into things than there really are. Also, although bco is a wonderful place for support, please remember that you are an individual and one persons experience may not be your own (even if your diagnoses are similar). Prepare a list of questions for your doctor and. let your doctor be the one to answer these questions as they pertain to you. Take care

Hi Andrea, I had a similar experience, and it was very upsetting and scary but is almost over and I am going to be fine. I had an estradiol test in January as part of a menopause check and it came back over 1000, if I remember correctly. When the results hit my patient portal I did just enough googling and checking this forum to assure myself it was all due to tamoxifen, but then the doctor called and told me I was scheduled for an urgent ultrasound and CA-125 test. Clearly she was expecting to find some monstrous ovarian tumor, and it was terrifying, but by the next morning I had those results and they didn't show anything like that. By early March, after a series of scans and blood draws that had turned February into prolonged scanxiety without coming up with anything remotely interesting except a couple of benign looking ovarian cysts and a thickened endometrial lining, I had been scheduled with a gyn/onc surgeon "to be in the best hands possible just in case." She wasn't at all worried about the ovaries, which had been my biggest fear, but was concerned about the possibility of endometrial cancer due to the tamoxifen. To summarize a complicated story, I had an in-office endometrial biopsy that came back benign, had a D&C and ovaries/tubes removed in March, got a surprise dx of complex atypical endometrial hyperplasia after that surgery, was allowed to wait until July for another D&C to see if it would calm down in the absence of tamoxifen and estrogen, learned that it hadn't, and had a hysterectomy last week. There's a better chance than I'd like that they'll still find some cancer in the endometrial lining, but if so, quite a good chance that the surgery has already removed all of it.

So ... I can't say unequivocally that it's turned out OK until I get that final pathology report and I finish recovering from this hysterectomy, but I am definitely an example of a person who had an off-the-charts estrogen level and did not have ovarian cancer ... and now, never will!

So glad to hear! And you touched right on one of the things I find so stressful about medical testing: I hate having other people know things about my body that I don't, knowing that something could be badly wrong even though I feel just fine. Thanks for affirming what others in my life don't always seem to understand. Let us know how the test turns out!

Recently I read that prostrate cancer might start producing its own testosterone even though an Rx is used to stop/block production. Has anyone heard if ER+ cancer might produce its own estrogen in response to AIs or Tamoxifen? I did not know this before seeing my oncologist earlier this month, so did not have a chance to ask her. My estrogen has never been monitored before/during Tamoxifen or AI. When I ask, I'm told that monitoring estrogen is not part of the standard of care. So it sounds like I could pay for a test with the usual blood draw for WBC. I will post this on other AI and tamoxifen threads, sometimes it seems like information is scattered.