Chemotherapy

 

Weird shit.

The treatment starts and you are pumped with medicines (basically it’s food poisoning at a slow rate but they call it medicine), which are supposed to stop cell growth and destroy cells in your body. In papa’s case, this goes on for about 5 days. In addition to the chemo meds, they give him palliative drugs as well - to avoid / limit the side-effects of chemo.

Once that’s done, at the end of the 5th day or the next day – the patient is hit with an injection. Papa’s case – Neulastim. This is supposed to get your blood count to normal.

Now, you have to get CBC tests done regularly, to ensure that your cells are back to reasonably normal levels. Once the oncologist is sure that the WBC/RBC etc are reasonably normal, they bomb you with chemo again (usually 14-16 days after the first chemo ended).

So first you destroy cells, then you give me something to boost production of new cells. Then you keep checking and once the cell levels are returning to normal, you start another chemo session to destroy them again!

no wonder medicine is ‘Practiced’.

The logic is supposed to be – Chemo destroys cancer cells, and then they need the body to produce healthy cells so your body is strong enough for another round of chemo to destroy the remaining cancer cells. The loop goes on.