Hi Monkeynuts and York-75, sorry not to have replied sooner than this. I had my last Abraxane last Wednesday and have had two radiotherapy planning appointments this week, so not much rest for the wicked! I can confirm that you will pretty certainly lose all your hair. My first lot of chemo was four rounds of EC which did away with about 98% of my hair but it started to grow again a week after the last treatment. Several weeks later it was 0.5-1cm long and I was very happy. Unfortunately the first round of Abraxane made it fall out again which I found very, very hard - almost harder than the first time. My eyebrows have given up the ghost completely now though I still have a few rather ragged looking eyelashes. Best news is I also have half a millimetre of very fine hair over most of my scalp, though it's completely white! I had most of my Abraxane with Carboplatin so it's hard to say exactly which side effects were attributable to which drug. I did find that my immune system dropped like a stone about day 4-5, which combined with significant low mood. This would improve as my immune system recovered. I had quite a lot of pain with the treatment, including terrible headaches which would be concentrated in my ears, jaw and round the base of my skull. Co-codamol helped with this, as well as helping to counteract the diarrhoea which was pretty bad at times. However for me the main problem with the treatment was peripheral neuropathy. Nothing after the first round but suddenly, on day 4 of the second cycle, wham out of nowhere my hands hurt. No warning tingling or anything. This got steadily worse for a week until I rang my BCN in tears and the team were alerted to my problem, which was mostly in my fingers though I do still have numbness in a few toes. My last treatment was delayed for a week, and then for another, as the oncologist was keen for me to have as much treatment as possible but not to cause permanent damage and loss of function - the pain was concentrated in the very tips of my fingers, which we use for fine motor control, and I was having problems with loads of everyday stuff (buttons, pens, turning pages, pressing any kind of button on devices, judging the strength of my grip when picking things up - my phone got dropped a lot!). It had finally improved enough for me to have my last dose last week, no Carboplatin and an 80% dose of Abraxane, and the neuropathy hasn't got any worse again so hopefully it'll gradually resolve. Sorry if this all sounds like a complete horror story - I found this regime much harder than EC but everyone's different and you may well have different side effects or not suffer nearly so much as I did. Lots of luck and love to you both, keep checking in because support from people in a similar position is so helpful xxx
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