My mother died of bowel cancer when I was a teenager, it has spread to her bladder, lungs and liver. I still wonder how it actually killed her. What went wrong that stopped her heart pumping and lungs breathing?
In: Biology
Cancer is basically a single word humans use to describe any clump of cells that (for a large variety of different reasons) decide to go rogue and start multiplying instead of doing the jobs they are usually supposed to do to keep us alive.
Sometimes, if the clump of cells (which gets called a “tumor”) is small enough and all in one place, doctors are able to simply cut it out with surgery. Other times, we’ll try to use drugs (chemotherapy) or radiation to basically carpet-bomb everything around the cancer, with the hope that our remaining good cells can rebuild afterwards.
Unfortunately, that carpet-bombing isn’t always effective, because if we completely nuke everything we wont have enough surviving good cells to rebuild, but if too many rogue cells survived they can just go on rebuilding tumors instead.
When some of these rogue cells start setting up shop in a place like the liver or kidneys it can be trouble. It’s different from say a heart attack, or stopping breathing, but we still absolutely need our kidneys and liver to function properly to filter out the waste products our own body naturally produces. If rogue cells hijack too many resources (like food, air, etc.) from our good cells so that our good cells no longer have enough energy to keep up with filtering out or processing all those waste products, then those waste products will start to accumulate in our blood stream and those waste products will end up basically poisoning everything. That poisoning is what can eventually cause our heart or lungs or brain to fail.
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