I have breast cancer and I’m starting radiation tomorrow. I understand that it’s supposed to reduce the risk of reoccurrence and that it is destroying cells. But how? Which cells are affected? Why will it make me tired?
In: Biology
Radiation therapy is essentially burning the cancer tissue with a high dose of ionizing radiation.
As other people said, the general idea with RT and chemo is to exploit cancer cells’ high proliferation rate and low ability to repair DNA damage, meaning that they are more vulnerable to these methods than regular cells.
For radiation therapy in particular, there’s a lot of hard physics involved in calculating the right dose and type of radiation for the depth of the lesion, so that most of it is actually absorbed where the nasty stuff is, while lessening collateral damage to healthy cells in the beam’s path.
Unfortunately, your regular cells do also get hurt in this process, and your body needs to take care of that damage. Also, it’s possible that the large number of cancer cells bursting dead from the treatment will release all sorts of pro-inflammatory signaling molecules, and systemic inflammation will also make you feel tired AF (think acute viral illnesses, or someone with some autoimmune disease)
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