What research should we be doing?
Hello BCNA community! This is my first post. I'm a scientist working on breast cancer and I was looking through some of the threads here and it strikes me that the issues we scientists think are the i...
Forum Discussion
Thank you @wingman. May I just add a little to the brain fog issue? Verbal memory and I think they call it executive functioning is impacted as well. For example, mixing two words together, losing words totally, starting a sentance and then just forgetting what you were going to say half way through. There are a lot of us around here describing every day items as the thingamajiggy or whatchamacallits.
Multi tasking is sometimes very difficult and the ability to focus under pressure is regularly non existant. This leads to being anxious because you can't think and feel like a complete idiot and then the worry makes it worse. There have been times I have had to leave my desk for 10 minutes until I can think again. There are days I choose not to drive because I don't trust my own judment. There are times I do not participate in conversations because I am bound to say something stupid or completely forget things that I know I know. Within a week to 10 days of not taking Tamoxifen I am back to very close to perfectly normal. It's a whole lot more than being a bit foggy. My biggest fear (apart from recurrence) is that we find out down the track it leads to early alzheimers or dimentia because that's sure what it feels like at times especially as we are now being advised to take these things for 10 years instead of 5.
Multi tasking is sometimes very difficult and the ability to focus under pressure is regularly non existant. This leads to being anxious because you can't think and feel like a complete idiot and then the worry makes it worse. There have been times I have had to leave my desk for 10 minutes until I can think again. There are days I choose not to drive because I don't trust my own judment. There are times I do not participate in conversations because I am bound to say something stupid or completely forget things that I know I know. Within a week to 10 days of not taking Tamoxifen I am back to very close to perfectly normal. It's a whole lot more than being a bit foggy. My biggest fear (apart from recurrence) is that we find out down the track it leads to early alzheimers or dimentia because that's sure what it feels like at times especially as we are now being advised to take these things for 10 years instead of 5.