No Chemotherapy

Elizabeth Edwards passed away from breast cancer yesterday hours after deciding to forgo further therapy. Chemotherapy acts by killing cells that divide rapidly, one of the main properties of cancer cells. This means that it also harms cells that divide rapidly under normal circumstances: cells in the bone marrow, digestive tract and hair follicles.

Chemotherapy can keep the disease at bay for a long time. Most women with advanced breast cancers undergo five or six different lines of chemotherapy. Unfortunately, chemotherapy is dangerous with many nasty side effects. This is what many doctors and scientists have to say about chemotherapy:

"The majority of the cancer patients in this country die because of chemotherapy, which does not cure breast, colon or lung cancer. This has been documented for over a decade and nevertheless doctors still utilize chemotherapy to fight these tumors." (Allen Levin, MD, UCSF, "The Healing of Cancer", Marcus Books, 1990).

I am currently taking a targeted cancer drug called Tarceva. Tarceva is not a cure but has shown to significantly slow the growth of tumors with minimal side effects. The most notable exception is a skin rash. Oddly enough, those with the worse rash fair better than those who don’t develop a rash. A study, published in the July 1 issue of Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, reports that for patients taking Tarceva who developed a moderate to severe rash, survival without progression of disease was 245 percent longer than in patients who had a mild rash or none at all. In fact, in the majority of cases, the more severe the rash, the longer a patient's cancer was held in check, researchers found.

Another option is to concentrate on quality of life. In many cases, patients actually live longer if they stop actively treating their cancer and focus on palliative care to relieve symptoms because chemo takes such a heavy toll on the body.

On Monday I have appointment with my oncologist who is very optimistic and persuasive. So I’m not going to get to concerned about whether I change my mind in the coming months.

For years I have coveted a BMW tour bike. Granted, I already own a Honda Goldwing 1800 but I only bought that because I could save some money by buying a used bike. Meanwhile, I have dreamed about how great life would be if I could cruise down the freeway on one of these babies. It just might be the ticket to improve my quality of life in 2011. Or I could save the money for one of those rainy days.