How is cancer so deadly but a person feels fine one day then the next they are told they have 4 months to live?
In: Biology
Lots of answers on here but they don’t cover all the important answers to the question/ELI5.
‘Feeling fine’: the sort of things that make you feel unwell are (as mentioned by another poster) infections (your body reacting to the infection and you get those flu like symptoms), blood loss (making you tired), and tissue destruction (pain). A further way you can feel unwell is from a lack of available energy (again being tired) because something in your body is using it up such as your immune system fighting a bad infection, a condition that sets of a strong inflammatory response such as major burns, trauma, pancreatitis etc, or because cancer (which has a very high metabolism) has spread across your body. Cancer can be growing for a long time before it spreads or causes tissue destruction and only some of them cause blood loss; colorectal (bowel) cancer being the prime example. The big problem with cancer is that it can be asymptomatic for such a long time, hence the importance of cancer screening programs like the good old colonoscopy for colorectal cancer.
‘4 months to live’: thankfully this situation doesn’t happen as often as you may think, there are a huge number of people who have had their cancer and are still here to tell the tale. The 4 months to live situation occurs when cancer has spread to other organs. You can think of the cancer as an island nation, slowly growing in population and once the population is high enough they send out ships to other island to colonise them (the cancer spreading). Just like human populations the cancer cell populations grown exponentially and once you’ve found cancer in another part of the body (from a CT scan for example) then it’s probably in lots of other places too. This leads to a higher risk of all the things listed about that cause symptoms and ultimately death.
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