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| Chemical onslaught | | HEALTH |
| Rrishi Raote / New Delhi Nov 02, 2008, 00:24 IST |
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Cancer is deadly but chemotherapy makes your life hell.
This week actor Patrick Swayze gave his first interview since he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January. It is a particularly nasty form of cancer, with a five-year survival rate of just 5 per cent. He’s in the news now, though, because he’s back to full-time acting, in the TV show The Beast, now in production, in which he plays an FBI agent with a dark past.
Work is what keeps him going, he says. That kind of motivation is important when faced with debilitating chemotherapy. “Chemo, no matter how you cut it, is hell on wheels,” he told the New York Times.
Likewise Jade Goody, who withdrew from Bigg Boss when told she had cervical cancer. This week she was photographed leaving hospital in London, looking utterly exhausted by her current round of chemotherapy. She was reported to have gagged several times on the way out.
Like many people, neither actor knew they had cancer before the doctors told them so. Until quite late, cancer scarcely makes its presence felt, whereas chemotherapy is a massive blow to the system.
Cancer chemotherapy has a range of toxic effects on the body. Although the chemicals are designed to target fast-growing cancer cells anywhere in the body, they also kill some healthy ones — such as those in the hair roots, intestinal lining and various kinds of blood cells. Scientists still do not know how to reliably differentiate between healthy and cancerous cells.
Apart from hair loss and anaemia, patients can also suffer memory loss, acute nausea, digestive problems, weight change, various ill-effects on the heart, kidneys and liver, and almost always a severe drop in immunity. Swayze said he used muscle-building protein shakes to help bring his weight up again after chemotherapy. Yet, even after a 10 kg gain, he is thinner than he used to be.
Cancer treatment has changed over the years, and it is now possible to limit some side-effects of chemotherapy. Yet they are controlled by additional drugs which inhibit, for instance, the gag reflex in patients — which means putting more chemicals into the body.
Because cancer is still mysterious, and too often discovered late, it is treated very aggressively. For the patient who knows that his life hangs by a thread, chemotherapy is a necessary evil often more immediately agonising than the cancer itself — and that’s the way it will remain until medicine finds a gentler solution.
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