When somebody dies of cancer, what exactly is the actual reason the body stops working?
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My dad died of metastasized brain cancer. But the cause or reason of the death was lung aspiration. In the last days of brain cancer your body literally shuts down slowly. It’s a peaceful way to go compared to other types of cancer.
The answer is, “it depends”, but in general, tumour tissue is non-funcitonal, and if enough non-functional tissue invades an organ, it interferes with the regular function of the organ. If you’re in stage 4 cancer, this is happening concurrently, in several organs throughout your body, and the remaining functional tissues is under an ever-increasing amount of stress as it has to compensate for all this non-functioning tissue which is dividing out of control and spreading, consuming nutrients, and excreting waste, often in ways that the body can struggle to cope with.
But not all cancers are the same, and it’s random chance to find out which comorbidity actually pushes the patient over the tipping point, if it can even be divined at all. You can also get mechanical failures, cancer of the lungs leads to hypoxia. Cancers in the stomach or colon can cause blockages, preventing you from absorbing food or eliminating waste. Cancers in the lymphatic system can cripple your immune system. Cancers in the brain can disrupt any number of critical functions.
Plus, of course, in all cancers, the treatments themselves are also very stressful. Methotrexate, one of the first chemotherapy drugs, invented back in 1947, and still used to this day, is an immunosuppressant and antimetabolite, binding with folate in your cells thwarting the synthesis of DNA, RNA, thymidylates, and proteins. For fast-replicating cancer cells, this can severely inhibit their growth, and even kill them off, but it also is quite good at killing your healthy cells, which also need to be able to synthesize DNA, RNA, thymidylates, and proteins.
So the side effects of your treatment can also lead to your death. Getting a flu or a cold is a mild inconvenience in a healthy person with a functioning immune system. When your immune system is paralyzed by your chemo drugs… it’s not good.
“How We Die: Reflections of Life’s Final Chapter” by Sherwin B. Noland has a chapter dedicated to describing what happens to your body with cancer.
Every chapter deals with a different affliction and explains exactly what happens to your body. I read it earlier this year and would highly recommend!
Cancer is like weeds in a garden.
You have roses, tomatoes, pomegranate trees (your vitals) in your garden (your body). The weeds (cancer cells) invade and start taking over resources (new blood vessels, nutrients get diverted more to cancerous growths) and slowly over time cause your roses, tomatoes and pomegranate to die (lack of blood flow to vitals). The weeds serve no purpose at all other than to grow uncontrollably and use up much needed resources.
Usually you would spray the weeds with herbicide (your immune system is constantly killing cancer cells) to kill them before they can proliferate but if you don’t habitually spray it in your garden (weakened immune system perhaps or other causes), the weeds will eventually overwhelm the garden.
You can call in garden services (cancer surgery/chemo) to clean the weed nightmare up in the hopes of saving your garden and some of the time they will permanently eliminate the weed infestation (cancer in remission) but other times the weeds will come back (recurrent cancer), sometimes requiring multiple garden services to treat the weed problem.
Bottom line is that the weeds will slowly kill your garden of useful plants to you leaving you with nothing to keep alive of value and once winter comes and the weeds die off due to lack of resources, you are left with dead plants entirely (you die).
Father had multiple myeloma. It ate away at his hip. When he could no longer be mobile that’s when the problems set in. Stage IV pressure ulcers. Infections. Sepsis. Ultimately he died of a heart attack. His body just gave out from the stress of constantly being attacked.
Cancer can also kill you if it is a cancer of cells that do a lot of chemical signaling by messing up your body by flooding it with too many chemical signals that cause secondary problems.
blood, cancer cells hoard blood, blood gives nutrition and protects from infection, if one area is protected(the cancer cells that hoard blood) and the other is not (normal organ tissue), guess which one is vulnerable and dies off
think of cancer as a invader or a thankless friend in your house, that eats all your stuff and occupies space by growing bigger and bigger, its greedy and blocks your daily activities and steals your food.
I’ve often wondered this OP
My brother died of lung cancer (stage 4 when detected) in 2017. He literally couldn’t breathe in the end, the cancer had taken over his lungs and they stopped processing oxygen.
depends on the cancer obvs
but ya you need ur organs to function to survive, so once your liver cancer has turned too much liver into tumors and/or clogged up the works, u donzos
brain tumor? probably dont need that extra pressure up there squeezing off blood flow to the rest of the brain, nevermind the chunk of brain that is now not function brain but instead teeth or toenails or whatevs
same shit just in different tissues , bone marrow , skin , kidneys , etc ; and ofc obvs its always bad when lil bits of cancer tumor tissue get into any kind of circulatory system like blood vessels or ur lymph nodes [malignancy] , cuz then you got little tumors growing all over [this is always uber bad]
Sometimes the treatment is what kills the person. Example pain killers, if you have to take so much pain killer that it Drop your respiration to the point it kills you, they still say the cancer killed you
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