I officially stopped taking Tamoxifen on July 6th. My breast cancer tumor was ER+ and PR+, which means the cancer feeds on estrogen and progesterone. Tamoxifen, in computer terms, performs a hard shutdown of my ovaries.
However, the drug has also used for chemical castration of homosexuals and pedophiles for a reason. For five years, I've had no interest in sex whatsoever. I'm lucky DH is more concerned about my health than our sex life.
On the other hand, I felt like a huge part of me was missing. I discovered I couldn't write my Alter Ego romances because to tell a story, I need to feel what the characters are feeling. And that just wasn't happening for the last five years I was on Tamoxifen. I put aside all the Alter Ego stories. I was lucky the books in the Suzan Harden series over the last five years didn't deal with a lot of romance. It's also part of the reason The Books of Apep series sat on the backburner for the last five years.
While Death Goddess Walking is mainly an urban fantasy adventure, there's a subplot using the romantic amnesia trope. That's one of the reasons I waited until I was off the Tamoxifen before I started working on the novel again. I couldn't recapture the feeling Selket and Anpu had for each other in the prologue until this summer.
It's rather nice to reclaim a part of myself that's been missing for so long.
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