Breast Cancer – Other Side Effects of Chemotherapy

Transcript

Other common side effects with the chemotherapy we use for breast cancer are nausea, although generally patients don’t have vomiting because the medications that we provide for antinausea are very effective. In addition, sometimes patients have diarrhea and something called neuropathy, which is when you get some nerve damage to your nerves, where you’ll start to feel symptoms of numbness, tingling. Sometimes people describe it as like an electrical type pain, or they’ll even say that sensation like they feel like something is just on the tips of their fingers. Like if you had glue when you were a kid on the tip of your fingers, your sensation will be slightly different. This is common with all of the chemotherapies that we use. And a lot of times this will recover after your chemotherapy. However, sometimes some of that damage can be permanent. So this neuropathy is common actually with some of the chemotherapies we use that’s in a family of medications called the taxols. A medication called paclitaxel is one of those medications, and oftentimes that’s given either weekly or every three weeks based on the particular regimen that your medical oncologist has determined for you.