So the hormone blocker blocks the fuel ( estrogen) from your cancer cell . No fuel, the cancer cell dies. It takes a cell quite a few divisions to become cancer, sometimes it will get killed off by the 3rd division, sometimes our good cells will get them right away and other times nothing stops them.
If you don't do the hormone blocker, you will have to wonder if anything is going on inside, every ache you feel you will wonder if its cancer growing somewhere and there will be no way of you finding out because insurance companies won't pay for scans just to do a check. This is why 2nd time around cancers wind up being Stage 4 because a woman has to feel pain somewhere or have some fracture that sends her to the ER and she then will get a CT scan and be told she has cancer in several places because the damn insurance companies have limitations on after care. They don't give a damn.

@A MyBCTeam Member the more I think about this the more infuriated I get. Something has to be done to change the aftercare women get in relation to being checked at least at the 6th point after chemo/radiation . Instead the drug companies throw out these drugs to women to take for years . If a woman goes through chemo and radiation those treatments SHOULD kill off cancer cells but we know they don't always . So heres a pill to take for 5-10 yrs to finish the job what chemo and radiation didnt do. So why even bother with those treatments and just have the surgery and take the pill ? Actually thats what I did and from my scan results it proved to have been successful so far. So, if that minimal amount of treatment could give that result for someone Stage 4, then I would think it would be enough for the other stages also

Mentioned Users

A MyBCTea...

Insurance companies sure have a great deal and kinship with Big Pharma. Women who have been diagnosed with Breast cancer need thorough checking for 5 years after diagnosis with at least a yearly scan if not two a year. If she is on any kind of drug therapy, a yearly scan. If she is unable to be on drug therapy due to other medical issues and/or unable to handle side effects then two scans. No woman needs to be rushed to the ER in excruciating pain because cancer ate away her spine or hip to find out her cancer metastasized. A scan would see that . Of course it wouldn't change the fact it had spread but she wouldn't have had to suffer a severe major fracture.

@A MyBCTeam Member

I totally appreciate your comments about the insurance companies.

I wish that there was some way that a blood test would give accurate information.

Mentioned Users

A MyBCTea...

Well thats the problem, you won't know if there are cancer cells in your body once chemo is done. This is one of my major complaints here about treatment and aftercare because a yearly mammo doesn't cut it. Breast cancer can return anywhere. And mammo's do boobs. Well that doesn't help much if there is a growing tumor in your liver or on your spine. I know the med is working because the sternal mets would have grown, the hip mets would have grown even more, more lymph nodes would have cancer and it could have mets to organs. You don't get the results I did by doing nothing.