Life as a cancer patient: ‘it feels like dying from the drugs meant to save me’
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Re: Life as a cancer patient: ‘it feels like dying from the drugs meant to save me’
#2A line from a passage I remember reading as a medical student, has stuck with me after a decade and a half. It described anticancer therapies as having the effect of "... poisoning patients to the edge of their existence..." It is not my belief that the side effect profile of anti tumor drugs has improved much.
So, yeah. Treatments for cancer can suck just as badly as the disease itself.
Re: Life as a cancer patient: ‘it feels like dying from the drugs meant to save me’
#3cancer treatment can also cause cancer and does - it was likely the cause of the death of my grandpa - but he got 10 more years due to a chemo-therapy from an otherwise lethal cancer - fuck cancer.
Re: Life as a cancer patient: ‘it feels like dying from the drugs meant to save me’
#4A line from a passage I remember reading as a medical student, has stuck with me after a decade and a half. It described anticancer therapies as having the effect of "... poisoning patients to the edge of their existence..." It is not my belief that the side effect profile of anti tumor drugs has improved much. So, yeah. Treatments for cancer can suck just as badly as the disease itself.
That’s not just the effect, it’s the mechanism of action for chemo — right?
It takes advantage of cancers rerouting blood and being overly aggressive in gathering resources to make those the first of your cells to die as you’re poisoned to death, on the theory that there’s some slightly sublethal dosage that kills only some of your cells (and hopefully, the cancerous ones).
Re: Life as a cancer patient: ‘it feels like dying from the drugs meant to save me’
#5My father was diagnosed with lung cancer 4 years ago. He is on his third round of chemo. I recommend reading "The Emperor of all Maladies" for an insightful book on cancer. Even though medicine has made great progress fighting cancer, the scorched earth approach is what most of these treatments come down to.
Re: Life as a cancer patient: ‘it feels like dying from the drugs meant to save me’
#6Chemotherapy is scary. It seems so counterintuitive to choose to inflict this kind of damage to oneself, in the hopes that it will prevent an even worse outcome.
Part of it is that there is this nagging feeling that it might not even be the right approach, given the legion of side effects of all kinds. Even oncologists get vague and evasive when this is questioned. In the end we can only rely on generalized statistics about survival rates, unsure of how it applies to individual situations.
I disagree with the anger people often show towards cancer. It's like people project some kind of malignant personality onto the phenomenon. I think of it as a natural part of life, like early hair loss. You can die from it, but death comes anyway, for one reason or another. At least with cancer you have time to get used to the idea, unlike an accident, heart attack or whatever. I guess I am a bit of a fatalist.
Re: Life as a cancer patient: ‘it feels like dying from the drugs meant to save me’
#7Traditional chemotherapy is toxic to all cells. Cancer cells grow rapidly (part of what makes them dangerous). So the toxic effect gets the cancer cells first, since cells that are growing take up the most chemotherapy. But other cells grow rapidly too, like hair and intestinal cells, which is why cancer patients lose their hair and have terrible nausea/diarrhea.
All (almost all?) cells take up some chemo. So, you are actually dying, just hopefully more slowly than the cancer. And then we stop the chemo before you all the way die.
This is why the bar for a cancer diagnosis is so high. We need biopsies to try to get as close to 100% accurate diagnosis as possible.
Re: Life as a cancer patient: ‘it feels like dying from the drugs meant to save me’
#8Being alive to criticize the treatment is usually better than the alternative.
Re: Life as a cancer patient: ‘it feels like dying from the drugs meant to save me’
#9Traditional chemotherapy is toxic to all cells. Cancer cells grow rapidly (part of what makes them dangerous). So the toxic effect gets the cancer cells first, since cells that are growing take up the most chemotherapy. But other cells grow rapidly too, like hair and intestinal cells, which is why cancer patients lose their hair and have terrible nausea/diarrhea. All (almost all?) cells take up some chemo. So, you ar…
That's right. Chemotherapy is, sadly, a very primitive treatment.
I regret we have spent so much money on cancer genomics, when some outsiders where trying to push for immunotherapies. Thankfully, that changed 3 or 4 years ago.
Re: Life as a cancer patient: ‘it feels like dying from the drugs meant to save me’
#10In pharmacy school I was told the paradigm in infections diseases was to identify the amount of medication to kill the pathogen, then give a little more. In oncology, it's to identify the amount of medication that would kill the patient, then give a little less.