eli5: Why cant they anesthetize chemo patients so they don’t feel the pain from chemotherapy?
In: Biology
My chemo “burned” my veins, the nurses had to dilute it, but then it took longer, the pain was unbearable, it was horrible!
I think lots of people have given a good eli5 for this, but I wanna come in with some more (eli5) depth about why and how chemotherapy causes pain to cancer patients
So I think we’ll all agree, cancer is a disease wherein some groups of cells divide more than they’re supposed to. In an ideal body (in adulthood), one should get no net gain in cells, right? If you produce more cells than you lose you’ll grow, if you produce less cells than you lose, you’ll break down.
So back to cancer, these cells are rapidly dividing, therefore most chemotherapeutics basically kneecap cells ability to divide. For a lot of cells in your body, this is fine- your heart cells and brain cells don’t need to divide a lot. But for tissues that see a lot of wear and tear and therefore need to divide – your gums, your airways, your skin, tear ducts, hair follicles- these are also kneecapped and can’t work as well
This causes your hair to fall out, gums to bleed, skin to be delicate, etc etc. All this is the price for kneecapping the cancer too. The futures looking better though, with time we’ll be able to develop and refine more ‘silver bullet’ approaches to treating cancers, and therefore less side effects on rapidly dividing non-cancer tissues
Source: stem cell researcher, lots of overlap with cancer biology
You’re headache last 24 hours but the Tylenol only last 5 minutes. And every time you use that Tylenol, you roll the chance of not waking up. Cancer sucks
I’ve been on chemo for an autoimmune disease, but the principles are the same as with cancer.
You would have had to knock me out for about 12-18 months straight. The horrible feelings come from your body almost dying as a result of the chemo, not the chemo itself. The drugs are basically designed to kill you slowly, and in the best case scenario, the fast splitting nature of cancer cells means it dies faster than the rest of you.
It’s not a battle, it’s a race to the finish line of death. All you can do is hope you lose the race.
As a former chemo patient, it wasn’t that kind of pain. The chemo being administered wasn’t the painful part. But afterwards I was so achy and uncomfortable and fatigued I couldn’t move. I remember just lying flat on my bed, too exhausted to move, letting tears just roll down my face because I was too uncomfortable to sleep. Low doses of dexamethasone helped the most.
Anaesthetising someone for the most part is sedating them and giving them a muscle relaxant, they’ll still feel pain, which is why the anaesthetist has to keep their pain controlled with analgesics, control heart rate and blood pressure etc. It’s not a magic fix all
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