Chemotherapy and Cancer....some basics!

I realized yesterday that I am so involved with my medicine and my medical team, that I probably have lost some perspective on how to explain cancer and the medicines I take. It is like when I was in graduate school and started to teach basic accounting classes to undergrads. I had to go back and look at all my old books to remember how to teach effectively.

The same is true of chemotherapy and cancer. I have spent a lot of time on this site explaining cancer so that everyone can understand that it is just an erosion of cells. If a person were to live a lifetime of approximately 90 years, they would have a 1 in 2 chance of getting cancer if they were a male and a 1 in 3 chance of getting cancer if they were female (per the American Cancer Society). This is not meant to scare you because let me assure you that if you get cancer at the age 90, your cells are growing and dividing at a snail's pace so you could live a long time with the disease and hardly have it affect you.

One of my big problems is that I am young so my cells grow and divide at a much faster pace than an older person. Honestly, this is not a bad thing unless the body gets in the habit of growing something it shouldn't...like cancer cells. Our immune systems can normally destroy a cancer cell before it gets out of control, but for some reason...my cells weren't communicating that effectively so cancer was not halted when it should have been.

That is when chemotherapy and other drugs are utilized. I would like to make the distinction that chemotherapy is a term used for a multitude of drugs, probably hundreds. Just as each cancer is unique, so are the chemo drugs. After a cancer diagnosis is made, a pathologist(a special kind of doctor who examines tissue) will spend some time running tests on cancerous tissue. The purpose of these tests are to figure out what kinds of medicines will work best for the cancer. Once these assessments are made, drugs are usually selected along with surgery or radiation as other options.

Sometimes, the cancer cells can develop resistance to drugs over time because our DNA is way to smart for us. Just as normal cells can evolve for the good, so can cancer cells evolve for the bad. I believe this is one of the reasons I am still dealing with cancer. I have a cancer that was not fueled by estrogen or progesterone, but was fueled by an oncogene called her2neu. This gene sat on the outside of my cancer cells and fueled their growth.

One of the drugs I take is called Herceptin. It targets her2 cells and tries to destroy them. There are other proteins like her2, there are actually her1, her3 and her 4. I take another drug that tries to wipe out the her1 and her2 in a different way than Herceptin. It is called Tykerb and it actually goes inside a cancer cell and works to destroy. However, there is some line of thinking that my cancer may still be able to use her3 or her4 to grow. So, on the horizon are drugs that tackle her1 through her4. There is one, in particular, that is in clinical trials right now. These drugs are called targeted drugs as they only go after specific characteristics such has her1 or her 2. They are not a chemo.

Gotta go for a bit, but my next post will explain why chemo takes your hair, causes nausea, etc.

Hope this helps explain some things!

Blessings,
Lolo