My fiancé was diagnosed with stage 4 Lymphoma last month and has cancer in different parts of his body. From my understanding, Lymphoma is a blood cancer, but it’s also in his liver, which is an organ. The doctors did tests to see if he had any in his bones, but he did not. I’ve tried asking the doctors and they tried to tell me it’s in the lymph nodes, and lymph nodes are all over the body. I don’t really know what lymph nodes are and they seemed really busy so I didn’t want to continually hold them up.
The way I thought our bodies worked was that each cell basically had one job. When we get cancer, one cell is defective and divides more than it is supposed to and creates a mass. From my understanding, all the cells in the mass are related to the one defective cell and shouldn’t influence cells with different jobs. They are just taking up extra space. How then does cancer get into organs and bones? Are those cancer cells still descendants of the original defective cell and just taking up residence in other parts of the body? Or are they communicating somehow with other cells and convincing them to behave in a similarly destructive way, making the cancer in the organs/bones different from the original?
In: Biology
Way oversimplified:
One of the body’s defenses against cancer is if a cell ends up in the “wrong” place, it gets sent a signal that tells it to, literally, kill itself. It’s easier to do that than figure out how to get the cell back to where it belongs, and it’s probably not a good cell if it wandered anyway.
Advanced cancers or “aggressive” cancers are producing cells that have mutated away that characteristic. So when they get that kill signal, they say “no u” and keep on trucking. That’s also why doctors can tend to tell what the original cancer was: the cells ARE descendants of that. So if you find a bunch of liver-like cells growing in a mass on the lungs, it’s generally a sign that the initial cancer was liver cancer.
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