eli5: Why cant they anesthetize chemo patients so they don’t feel the pain from chemotherapy?
In: Biology
The pain usually comes after they leave. It makes you extremely sick because of the way it works. The worst of those effects aren’t felt until well after the person has left the hospital.
So unless they want to be knocked out 24/7, pain and discomfort is just an inevitability.
The pain doesn’t come from the drugs being injected, it’s the after effects, that are the bad part.
Usually you don’t start feeling really bad till the next day or two days later (from personal experiences, not a doctor).
The other problem is that anesthesia, while it’s common and well known, isn’t a perfect science and it still always carries a risk, any medication does, and why risk the possibility that the chemo drugs and anesthetic and the patient might have some bad reaction, when you can instead just not give them extra drugs.
Small edit: the personal experience is from watching/helping my mother go through her treatment, and for those wondering I’m happy to say that now she’s doing great!
I read your title and got the terms anesthetize and euthanize confused for a second. As you might imagine, I was initially horrified.
I’m not an anesthesiologist, but I suspect it’s because it would add significant risk and expense to an already criminally expensive process for only a temporary delay in the suffering the procedure causes.
Chemo is basically poison that kills cancer cells, but also kills normal cells along the way. The meds don’t really cause acute pain. It is just your body reacting to getting poisoned.
It varies hugely depending on individual, which chemotherapy drugs, what dosages, what frequency.
But, basically, Because after each dose in general you’ve got a few days of the worst of the effects before they subside. And they can be dosed weekly or every few days for months.
Putting someone into effectively an induced coma for 6-12 months is impractical at best, bad for their health at worst.
Anaesthetics are actually a very dangerous type of medication. Not so much on a healthy person, but on people who are already suffering from illnesses like cancer, or treatments like chemo, it becomes much riskier.
It can be done if it’s necessary. The risk isn’t so high that it would never be done. But it’s just not worth the risk when you could instead administer pain medication.
And that’s forgetting the fact that chemo side effects are protracted. You couldn’t reasonably keep someone under to avoid all of the side effects of chemo. You’d have to keep them under for days at a time.
What are they going to do? Anesthetize you for months?
I was on Arsenic Trioxide and All-Trans Retinoic Acid for Acute Promyeloytic Leukaemia. As others have said, it’s not exactly painful at the time (your experience may vary), but the longer term side effects are what bother you.
Oddly enough the ATRA caused the worst side effects I had REALLY bad headaches caused by the ATRA increasing my intercranial pressure. It also caused my skin to dry out and become really sensitive.
The only issue I personally had during actual treatment (excluding my induction treatment when I was very unwell) was it messed with my sense of taste, so eating during my infusion was always a bad idea.
I have a bone disease and my last dose of zoledronic acid was this past August. I’m not finished, but that drug is aggressive enough that I can only have it five times and then they have to switch to something else.
I felt fine after my first dose though. I actually went to a museum and dinner later on in the same day. Then I got home and slept for 27 hours. I was completely unprepared for what this drug was about to do to me.
After I woke up I felt terrible. Everything hurt. Constant, dull aches all over. Sharp, stabbing, and searing pains in my spine every time I moved (the bone disease is primarily there). It felt like I had been hit by a car (I’ve been hit by a car as well so I know exactly how much that sucks). For the first month or so all of my normal pain is amplified.
Another big side effect I was blindsided by was that, for whatever reason, it completely saps all my strength and energy. I struggle to walk for more than about 45 consecutive minutes (I’ve pushed to around an hour and a half a few times but paid dearly after every one). After I’m done with a short walk I usually fall asleep for a few hours because there’s just no energy left.
As much as I would love to not be awake for all of this, that’s not really an option.
I’ve had chemo, although not as much as cancer or leukemia patients and the chemo being injected doesn’t hurt, in most cases it’s like most intravenous treatments (I had some intravenous treatments that actually hurt being injected but that’s a whole other story). What hurts is the side/ after effects that follow which anesthesia obviously cannot help with.
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