Cancer treatments are poison. The big problem with killing cancer lies in the fact that your cancer is you. It is your own cells gone rogue. That means the anything that kills the cancer can — and will, if it’s not used very carefully — kill you. It also means that even when it is used very carefully, it will still be killing you.
The trick — and it is a trick — is to give the poison that kills you in doses that allow it to kill the cancer without killing you. In the name of killing cancer, doctors makes you as sick as they can without actually killing you.
Sometimes, they miss, and you die from the treatments before the cancer would have done you in. This is something medical people don’t like to talk about. Other times, the treatments don’t kill you at the time, but they damage your body so seriously that you die from the aftereffects later.
“Chemo brain” is the name people use to describe the damage that cancer does to your brain. It turns out that the brain is a surprisingly resilient organ. Usually, in time, it regains most of its former smarts. Not always. But mostly.
I haven’t heard so much talk about the damage that radiation to the chest area and chemo do to the heart. But it can be massive … and permanent. I personally know someone who survived the breast cancer treatment and died a couple of years later from the damage the radiation and chemo had done to her heart.
Cancer kills a lot of ways, including indirectly, by means of its treatments.
From the National Cancer Institute:
Certain cancer treatments can damage the heart and the cardiovascular system. These side effects, including high blood pressure, abnormal heart rhythms, and heart failure, can be caused or exacerbated by chemotherapy and radiation therapy, as well as by newer forms of cancer treatment, such as targeted therapies and immunotherapies.
“Cancer therapies affect a number of organs and organ systems, including the heart,” said Saro Armenian, D.O., M.P.H., at the meeting. Dr. Armenian, who treats children with cancer at City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, noted that when a patient develops cardiac side effects during treatment, a doctor may modify the dose of a therapy or stop the therapy altogether.
Some cardiac side effects, however, go undetected for years or even decades after a patient’s treatment has ended. “Patients diagnosed with cancer are living longer today than in the past, and many of these survivors are living long enough to develop late cardiovascular effects,” said Lori Minasian, M.D., deputy director of NCI’s Division of Cancer Prevention, in an interview.
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