Life During and After Chemotherapy - How Your Body Has Changed

When you have cancer, the conventional treatments are surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. If you are lucky, you can get away with surgery and radiation with no chemotherapy. Not to downplay surgery and radiation side effects, chemotherapy side effects can be significantly worse. Cancer treatments are considered invasive treatments and will have adverse effects on your body - during and long after.

Radiation in simple terms is basically bombarding the cancer area with toxic radioactive materials. The effect of this bombardment stays long after the radiation treatment is over. Radiation also kills surrounding good cells.

Chemotherapy in simple terms is putting poison into the body and the poison kills everything including good cells and cancer cells. Cancer cells are more aggressive and absorb a lot of the poison and dies The good cells do absorb the poison as well but since there are more good cells around, the body recovers. When all the cancer cells die off or rather undetectable by scans, then, one is considered in remission.

When one gets cancer. it is only after 5 years of being in remission, then only can one be considered free of cancer. Remission periods are stages where one has to be extra careful and take good care of the body to prevent relapses or the development of other cancers. This is especially so when one has undergone Chemotherapy, as the risk of developing other cancers are higher. Chemotherapy is either administered orally or intravenously., and because the toxins go into the body, it can affect the entire being adversely.

During the initial stages of Chemotherapy, the effects are minor and manageable. The poison is still not significant enough to cause severe damage to any of the body systems. However, as the Chemotherapy treatments continue, fast growing cells in hair follicles, digestive tract and bone marrow start to die. This is the reason a chemotherapy patient experiences hair fall, and adverse stomach discomfort and stomach pain. Blood production is also compromised because the poison is also absorbed into the bone marrow. When white blood cells are significantly reduced, the body cannot ward off infections from bacteria and viruses. As the Chemotherapy treatments progress, the onslaught of the toxins takes its toll on the body. It affects all the body's organs. Some people have to stop chemotherapy because the poison has started to affect vital body organs like the kidney and liver.

Besides the physical effects like hair loss and stomach discomfort, vomiting, stomach cramps and stomach pain, the entire body also loses physical strength. Simple things can become quite tiring and difficult to perform during Chemotherapy. A regular long distance runner can be reduced to walking less than a kilometer on a good day. And because the digestive system is affected by the poison, appetite and nutritional intake are also compromised. This can often result in a person losing a lot of weight. Staying awake can become a problem as well.

Even long after Chemotherapy treatments have been completed, the side effects can still be felt. Tiredness and certain food reactions are common. But all these physical effects will dwindle away once Chemotherapy is completed and time will heal the body. It is a very slow healing process. It can take at least one to two years before any normalcy can be expected. During this recovery period, it is very important to take extra precautions to let the body heal by controlling food intake, getting plenty of rest and slowing down in general.

Th Ong has fought cancer and won. He shares his story and his research to prevent cancer in the first place. He gives his book OnTopOfCancer for Free on the internet at http://ontopofcancer.blogspot.com

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