When someone has cancer and they take kemo, or radiation treatments, does it really help? I have a friend that is 30 years old and she is on her death bed. She has swelled up like a balloon with water in it, and I was wondering what causes this, and does the treatments given for cancer really work, or does it just prolong death for a while?
She was diagnosed 1 year ago with a brain tumor, which was removed, and then it has just spread rapidly throughout her body.
2007-01-08 08:14:29 · 5 answers · asked by Jenna 4 in Health ➔ Diseases & Conditions ➔ Cancer
Cancer is a terribly difficult disease to treat because it is an unregulated growth of your own cells. Killing cancer cells typically also results in killing normal cells. How radiation and chemotherapy typically work is by damaging a cell's DNA or RNA, the material that encodes cellular information. Normal cells have regulatory proteins that will repair damaged DNA or RNA. Cancer cells devote all of their time and energy to replicating and dividing, so typically they don't undergo the normal screening mechanisms and repair. This is how it becomes therapeutic, normal cells will repair the damage inflicted by chemotherapy and radiation whereas cancer cells won't.
It sounds almost like your friend has Glioblastoma Multiforme. It is a horrible brain tumor that affects younger age groups and can metastasize (spread) quickly. She has probably swelled up not because of the chemotherapy but because she is requiring large amounts of volume to support her vital systems. She is just volume overloaded and the fluid escapes into the soft tissues. If she has stage IV (widely metastatic) glioblastoma, chemotherapy will honestly only prolong the inevitable. She's going to die, and from the sounds of things it will probably be quite soon.
I'm sorry for you and your friend. Good luck to you.
2007-01-08 08:31:09 · answer #1 · answered by tiredsurgeon 3 · 2⤊ 0⤋
This has been a common ethical debate for years. Chemotherapy and radiation is intended to either kill cancer cells or shrink tumors/other possibly malignant cells. Sometimes radiation and chemotherapy work and the cancer is erradicated, but if it has spread, there's not much of a chance of survival.
Sometimes terminal patients are given the option to take the treatments with the hopes that it will prolong their lives. Here's where the ethics are brought into play...chemo makes you violently ill and although you might live a few months more, is the quality of life what it should be?
Some terminal patients choose to not take the treatments knowing they're going to pass anyway and just want their final days to be peaceful and as without debilitation as possible.
2007-01-08 16:27:25 · answer #2 · answered by Chick-A- Deedle 6 · 2⤊ 0⤋
I'm sorry about your friend. I hope there's a miracle to help save her life. I was under chemotherapy when I had hodgkin's disease. I've been in remssion for about 6 years now. The treatments did help me as I had a strong immune system to fight the cancer as well as take in the effects of chemotherapy which made me fatique, and nausea all the time. I was 18 at the time when I was taking treatment.
Some cancers are just too strong that they rapidly grow faster than other cancers which they'll conquer the body before the treatment can kill them all. Each cancer has it's own cure rate from not likely to most likely being cured, it depends hat type of cancer is detected.
The best defensive is building up the immune system because that's what naurally fights viruses, bacteria in the body.
2007-01-08 16:26:39 · answer #3 · answered by JenGen 4 · 2⤊ 0⤋
It has been my experience that each person is different in reaction to the treatment that they are receiving. It would depend on whether or not the chemo and/or radiation treatments are working. I've had members in my family with different types of cancers and all of them responded differently to the treatments.
2007-01-08 16:24:14 · answer #4 · answered by spacityb 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Chemo is a chemical solution that kills cells. Unfortunately it has no idea what cells it kills, so along with your cancer cells, it also kills hair folicals, immune cells, ect... thats why most people on Chemo feel worse that they did before they started treatment, but Chemo and Radition can both put cancer into remition.
*All medicine is practices to stave off death, there is no cure for death*
2007-01-08 16:24:21 · answer #5 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 1⤋