Cancer doesn’t only take its toll on your physical wellness, but the emotions and worries that it inundates you with can really harm your mental wellbeing too. Your treatment option is just one thing that brings these worries along but hopefully, knowing the facts about cancer treatment can help you to decide what’s right for you, and feel more in control.
Firstly, if your cancer is localised and not spread to other parts of your body, surgery is your best chance for remission, especially if you have breast, prostate or lung cancer. Your surgeon can remove just the tumour, or the whole organ. Surgery can also be used to diagnose cancer and tell what stage it is in. Your doctor might recommend that you have surgery to remove tissue that’s likely to develop into cancer, though there are no cancer signs currently, and this is called preventative surgery. You might also have palliative surgery, which is used to relieve some of the pain or disability (bowel obstruction, etc.) that your cancer causes.
Chemotherapy uses anticancer drugs to destroy cancer cells, stop them from spreading and slow their growth. This targets any rapidly dividing cells like bone marrow cells, hair follicles, etc which, if normal, will repair, but cancer cells will die out because they are unable to do so. Preoperative or neoadjuvant chemotherapy is used to shrink your tumour before surgery or radiotherapy, as this minimises the destruction and maximises the effectiveness of these secondary treatments.
Chemotherapy may have adverse effects on your bone marrow, reducing the number of red cells and platelets in your body and leading to anaemia and increased tendency to bleed. It may also deplete your immune system, making you susceptible to infections, and temporarily make you experience fatigue, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea or constipation, hair loss or thinning, and infertility.
Radiotherapy uses ionizing radiation to kill cancer cells and shrink tumours, either externally through a machine (external beam radiotherapy) or internally by placing radioactive material in your body near your tumour cells (brachytherapy). Systemic radiotherapy injects radioactive substances into your blood. All of these techniques targets specific areas and damages the genetic material of cells, meaning that normal cells recover but cancerous ones do not.
It may be used in leukaemia, lymphoma, cancers of the brain, lung, skin, breast, cervix, prostate, pancreas, and stomach, and your dose of radiation depends on your type and site of cancer. These two factors also affect your chances of side effects, but you can commonly and temporarily experience red and sore skin, fatigue, dry mouth and loss of appetite, diarrhoea from radiotherapy to the abdomen, hair loss from radiotherapy of the head and neck, and low sex drive and infertility from radiotherapy to pelvic area.
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