Cancer Diary: Cancer Is Not Cancer Is Not Cancer Is Not Cancer

 


Recently on Twitter, a cancer victim complained that friends kept elatedly sending her information about a potential cure for rectal cancer. She suffers from breast cancer! Sort of like rubbing salt in a wound, but the confusion is understandable for those who know little about cancer.

Our vet (oncology expert) suggested that we ask Carl's oncologists to consider immunotherapy for Carl. We clung to that possibility initially since immunotherapy had thrown our little Snyezhka into full remission after having been given a maximum of four months to live. Nearly two years later, she is still with us and is healthy. 

Carl was given just days to live when he was diagnosed with advanced metastatic cancer involving five organs. We clung to the hope that Stanford University Cancer Center might recommend immunotherapy; that was one of the possibilities the oncologist mentioned. Yes!

However, immunotherapy is highly targeted -- against the source cancer. Test after test ruled out each of the five organs affected by cancer as not being the primary. In fact, the primary was never found. Carl was ultimately diagnosed with cancer of unknown primary and died five months later in spite of Stanford's most valient efforts. (The choice of treatment was chemotherapy -- a combination of a broad band drug to try to get to the primary whatever it was and a narrow band drug against the digestive tract organs, which is where the oncologist's instinct said the cancer might have started. The chemotherapy at all. It did not make Carl sick. It did not even slow down the cancer in spite of being what the oncologist's said was the best and strongest treatment that he had.

Effective treatments are specific. Effective treatments are targeted. A "cure" for rectal cancer can no more help a patient with breast cancer than care for an injured knee help a broken arm! 

Blog editor's note: As a memorial to Carl, and simply because it is truly needed, MSI Press is now hosting a web page, Carl's Cancer Compendium, as a one-stop starting point for all things cancer, to make it easier for those with cancer to find answers to questions that can otherwise take hours to track down on the Internet and/or from professionals. The web page is in its infancy but expected to expand into robustness. To that end, it is expanded and updated weekly. As part of this effort, each week, on Monday, this blog will carry an informative, cancer-related story -- and be open to guest posts: Cancer Diary. 

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