Fighting Cancer – Part II

In my first post about fighting cancer, I talked about needing a team. This time I will talk about some other ways to fight cancer.

The first thing that comes to mind is a positive attitude. Since I found out I have cancer, I don’t know how many people have told me that “studies show that people with a positive attitude do better beating cancer than those with a negative attitude.” Of course, I have never seen these studies, but I choose to believe that they exist.

Now, having a positive attitude is not always easy. When one is faced with their mortality, the fear of death is very real. When you realize that death is only a matter of doing nothing, then it is very easy to get depressed. It is very easy to feel like giving up and letting nature take its course. As my wife wrote, “Dying is the easiest. After all, it’s the ultimate path of least resistance.“ If you let depression get the better of you, then you decide your fate by doing nothing.

But if you want to live, then you have to fight. You have to pull yourself out of your funk and decide that you will not “go gently into that good night”. How do you do that? Well, that is the hard part. First of all, you have to allow yourself to feel down. After all, you have every right to be depressed. You have every right to feel that life is hard. That is where your team comes in. With people helping you, you are able to get past those feelings. You are able to want to live again and enjoy life. This is not easy to do, but it is necessary.

Apart from the positive attitude, there is another part to fighting cancer that everybody abhors. Chemo.

There are different types of chemo for different types of cancer. The job of chemo is to kill the cancer. Usually this is done by seeking out the cancer cells, the cells that are fast growing. The problem with this is that apart from killing the fast growing, bad cells, it also kills the slower growing, good cells that are nearby. This is the cause of nausea, hair loss, and other bad side effects.

As for me, I am on two types of chemo. The first one is called Xeloda and taken orally. This type is pretty easy on the system, causing slight fatigue, but that is about all. The second type is called Oxaliplatin and is much more toxic. Apart from causing extreme fatigue (I usually spend the entire week after the treatment in bed), one of the side effects is called peripheral neuropathy. This usually manifests itself as a “pins and needles” feeling in the fingers and toes when exposed to cold. This means that I cannot touch anything cold, cannot reach into the refrigerator, cannot hold a cold drink, etc. I also cannot drink anything cold. Everything has to be at room temperature or it causes a sore throat when I drink.

Basically it is important to remember that chemotherapy is a way of ingesting metered amounts of poison into your body. It is enough poison to kill the cancer, but not enough to kill you. Hopefully.

So attitude and chemo are two other items needed in one’s fight against cancer. Attitude is important. Chemo sucks.