Zometa Bisphosphonate Side Effects

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Hi All

I have wandered around this website for a number of months but never posted anything, so here goes!

I was diagnosed with secondary breast cancer (bone and liver) in Dec 2009 after initial primary diagnosis in 2003.

After the usual 7 months of chemo together with zometa and radiotherapy I’m now in a good place just having a 4 weekly zometa top up and aromasin.

I had an extended holiday break for 10 weeks at the back end of last year and so I’ve just started back on zometa again every 4 weeks. The 2 courses I’ve had have not been great. I’ve been getting really bad lower back pain, throbbing together with nausea. I may have had similar symptoms when I first started zometa in 2009 but it was given with the chemo. When the chemo finished I continued with zometa but my tolerance was probably up.

Has anyone else experienced Zometa symptoms like this. I was wondering whether to keep at it or move to extend the time between courses as its taking me out 5-6 days across the 4 week period.

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Hi Wilf
I had pamidronate as my IV bisphosphonates and other than the first one I didn’t have any particular symptoms on each other one. I can’t help with the zometa side effects but am bumping this up so someone else will hopefully see it and help out. Good Luck with all your treatments.
Nicky

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I had pain in my lower back and legs and at times it would be so severe I couldn’t even climb the stairs without crawling the last few steps. This would gradually get better over the course of the month but would start again as soon as I had had my dose. My onc suggested switching to oral bisphosphonates and that has helped although I still have some pain, just not as bad.