Stay Healthy During Chemo. Джо Диспенза
scientists began to study how chemicals derived from nitrogen mustards might arrest the growth of cancer cells.
In 1942, during World War II, an accident exposed several hundred people to mustard gas in the Italian town of Bari. Those who survived were discovered to have very low white blood cell counts. After the war, researchers experimented with using chemicals to fight cancer, starting with mustine, developed from nitrogen mustards.
The first chemotherapy drugs were born in warfare and have never lost their bellicose expression. In the 1970s and 1980s, when cancer began to emerge as “the emperor of all diseases,” as one recent book calls it, cancer patients were encouraged to engage in noble combat with the disease, imagining healthy cells in the body doing battle against cancer cells—and winning.
Allusions to chemotherapy's wartime past are also evident in how we frame the treatment of “aggressive” cancers that “advance” rapidly and therefore must be killed, destroyed, eradicated, wiped out, exterminated. When the National Cancer Act of 1971 was announced, it was immediately named “the War on Cancer” by the media. Other efforts to support cancer research are routinely referred to in warlike terms. Obituaries report that a person “lost his battle against cancer.”
These warlike allusions attached to chemotherapy are entirely appropriate, since chemo does indeed kill—and, as I have said before, when it does, it destroys healthy cells along with cancerous ones. The challenge for cancer patients and caregivers is to allow chemo to do its destructive work on malignant cells, while at the same time trying to stay healthy enough to withstand the onslaught (another warfare term) of the necessarily lethal chemicals.
Since 1971, when President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, the United States has spent $2 trillion on conventional cancer treatment and research, but it is a war we appear to have lost. Mortality rates are about the same as they were in 1950. To give a further warlike perspective, more Americans will die of cancer in the next fourteen months than have died from all the wars that the United States has fought combined.
Even though chemotherapy has its roots in war, a cancer patient does not have to become attached to the battle images that arise when discussing treatment. In fact, I think it is best not to envision a war raging inside the body of a cancer patient; better to see it as a healing process that is taking its course to well-being.
What Chemo Will Not Do
Chemotherapy is designed to kill cells in the body and, by accomplishing that, will stop rapidly dividing cells from multiplying. That is what it will do. What chemo will not do is make a person healthy.
The mission of chemo is a quick and thorough seek out, find, and destroy operation, to call upon more warlike terms. The rest is about staying healthy during chemo treatment and returning to vibrant well-being after the toxic chemicals and the residue from dead cancer cells have passed out of the body.
It is important to remember that chemotherapy will not heal the body, since it is not designed to do that. What chemotherapy will do is destroy cells. The idea here is that once cancer cells are attacked and removed, the body can then take over and heal itself.
When cancer cells are no longer viable and cease to divide and multiply, they are flushed out of the body as waste material. At that point the environment in the body is changed from a functioning system compromised by a spreading cancer to a system that promotes the body's well-being. Changing the environment creates the healing scenario.
I mention this here, because there is often a misunderstanding among cancer patients that chemotherapy actually does the healing work involved in recovering from cancer. It does not heal, but it sets the scene for healing by getting rid of the offending aberrant cells. Tumors will go away or be reduced, and other symptoms brought on by the cancer will vanish, hopefully, including pain, bodily discharges, and so on. Returning to good health, though, is another issue entirely.
Chemotherapy will not make a cancer patient well; it will, however, and under the best of circumstances, destroy the cancer that is preventing wellness. In other words, chemo will not produce the solution, but it will help to take away the problem. That is something enormous, of course, and needs to be acknowledged and respected. To keep with the warlike metaphors that chemo has suggested since its creation, it is powerful ammunition for a seek-and-destroy medical mission.
Another thing that chemotherapy will not accomplish has to do with the immune system. Chemo is so potent, as I've said before, that it weakens the body's own means of protecting itself, which is why so many people on chemo will come down with colds or the flu or worse on their way to being healed from cancer.
Let's remember that chemotherapy is not intended to, and therefore will not, promote the body's self-healing mechanism directly, although it does so indirectly by helping change the environment in which the cancer is thriving. A cancer patient's immune system, after it is compromised by the attacks on cancerous cells, will rise and fall with no help from chemo itself. To protect and enhance immunity, much will depend on what is done outside of the chemo clinic.
Chemo's Negative Side Effects
The positive effect of chemotherapy, in the best of circumstances, is the killing of cancer cells in the body of a cancer patient. But, as we all know, along with the good comes the bad. The distress accompanying chemotherapy is for some almost as difficult to endure as the cancer itself.
Invariably, a person who has been diagnosed with cancer will receive, along with a schedule of chemotherapy treatments (assuming chemo has been prescribed), a list of the precise drugs that will be used and their “possible” side effects. As if the catalog of the drugs and their descriptions is daunting enough, the litany of side effects is scary indeed.
The following are the most common side effects of chemotherapy, depending on the type of cancer, the type of chemo drugs administered, and their dosages. Not every cancer patient will experience all of the side effects, but most will experience at least some of them.
Immune system depression is the first, most obvious, and most dangerous. The immune system is suppressed to the point where the body can be prey to illness and infections that would ordinarily be quite harmless. This is why doctors will tell chemo patients to avoid crowds, where they might come into contact with contagious potentially dangerous bacteria and viruses. For a healthy person to be in a room with someone who has a cold is no problem; for the chemo patient, it could mean days or weeks suffering the contracted cold—sometimes it might even result in a hospital stay.
Fatigue is the result of fighting both the cancer and the chemo. It is always mentioned in the literature of what to expect from chemotherapy treatment. In some cases, anemia will be detected and drugs will be prescribed to address it. Most cancer patients can be spotted for their tired and haggard looks, slow movements, and cloudy thinking—all of which are symptoms of fatigue. Most of the fatigue is due directly to the accumulation of toxins in the liver.
Hair loss occurs almost immediately after the first chemo treatment. It happens because the chemotherapy drugs go after all rapidly dividing cells, and hair follicles are among the fastest-growing cells in the body. This is a physical effect that has tremendous emotional and psychological counterparts. Almost all cancer patients report the shock they felt at first seeing all their hair gone, straining to recognize the person in the mirror.
Damage to other parts of the body is also a potential side effect of chemotherapy. An oncologist will be on the lookout for breakdowns in areas of the body that may not be contaminated with cancer, but are the result of the powerful work of the chemo. These areas include, but are not confined to, the heart, the liver, the kidneys, the inner ear (manifesting as imbalance), and the brain.
Chemo brain. On the subject of the brain, cancer patients on chemo will almost universally report fogginess in thinking, forgetting things, an inability to come up with the right word, and so on. These lapses are more than the ordinary brain stops-and-starts that are part of virtually everyone's experience. For a person receiving chemo treatments, this is part of the process and can