This is an item about cancer... if you've had it, know someone who's had it
(and who doesn't?), or how you are dealing with it. It amazes me that with the
technology and knowledge we have now, we can't seem to eradicate this horrible
disease, considering it's been around for so long. 

My grandmother died of bone cancer (multiple myeloma) in 1988. Just yesterday I
heard that a bone marrow transplant can possibly lead to a full remission. I am
happy to hear this, but it's 9 years too late for my grandmother, who did not
have a chance.

15 responses total.

My father suffered from melanoma from 1971 to his death on April 13, 1972,
at the age of 55.  He had been working for what was then known as Stauffer
Chemicals (silicon division) in Adrian, Michigan.  Not sure if his exposure
to chemicals was the source of his cancer, but I wouldn't be surprised if it
was.

I am what you would call high-risk for breast cancer....the doc's aren't
calling it an "if" so much as a "when".  My father's mother died of it before
I was born, While my mother's mother had one breast removed due to cancer
about 10 years ago, and the other one removed about 2 weeks ago as a
precatiounalry measure.  Her mother died of breast cancer also.  My
grandmother is just so thankful to have survived it, since she is the first
woman in her family to live past 60.  She believes that breast cancer is what
her grandmother died of also.  Needless to say, this scares the crap out of
me.  On the other hand, I do have faith in science....it did save my grandma.

Meg, there is genetic testing now available that can tell 
you whether you are a carrier of your family's breast cancer
gene.  Some would rather not know for sure but many women
would and some preventative interventions are available for
those for whom the disease looks inevitable.

I didn't know that, Mary.  Thanks for the info!  That sounds like a very good
thing. (The invention, not the cancer...)

My younger brother, Adam, was diagnosed with Lymphoblastic Lymphoma when he
was seven years old after removal of a tumor from a saliva gland.  He was
diagnosed VERY early-on, which is good because lymphoma can spread to other
lymph nodes.  He was put on chemo right away, and after three years of
treatment was stable in remission.  It's been about nine years since then
(wow...), so he's considered "cured".  The doctors told us, but NOT him, that
there is a chance that it could reappear in twenty years or so.  There isn't
any need for Adam to know...why worry him if it's a slight chance?  The poor
kid went through so much.  It hurt to see my baby brother unable to walk or
talk because the chemo made him so sick.  You could see it in his *eyes*...
I'm glad he's better now.  I feel for everyone who is dealing with this
themselves, with a family member, or lost someone they loved to it.  =(

My mother withstood breast cancer for some 17 years (pretty much all of my
life at the time) before dying in 1984.  Tough lady!

Fortunately no one in my family on either side had breast cancer. But most on
my dad's side died of cancer. My grandfather died before I was born, but he
started out with lung cancer. It spread to his pancreas and liver. He was in
his 60s. It amazes me how cancer just "eats up" everything around it.

And a lot of times it seems chemo doesn't work. My friend's husband had liver
cancer and went through rounds of chemo and radiation. He lasted maybe a year
altogether. He had been scheduled for another set of treatments but died the
week before in his late 50s. 

Do you think marijuana should be available to those who are suffering from
chemo effects? It's been shown that pot (whether smoked or eaten like in a
brownie) can increase the appetite and alleviate the bad side effects. It's sad
how when you need to keep your strength up and eat, you can't bear to do so.
Chemo kills the good cells as well as the cancerous ones... if only there would
be a way it could somehow recognize only the bad ones.

Absolutely.  And for end-stage pain control heroin should be
made available if conventional narcotics aren't cutting it.

Anti-drug as I am, I agree with Mary (yikes!). I suppose it's the THC in the
marijuana that gives it those properties. Seems maybe science could replicate
those properties of THC into a legal medication.

And I think if a person is in end-stage, by all means pull out the stops and
give the patient whatever it takes to keep them comfortable. Morphine was
enough for my grandmother, but if she were in pain I'd be liable to go out and
buy heroin myself for her.

Which makes me wonder, why exactly is cancer painful?

 Hmm.. article in Discovery Health News today.

Nuclear Waste May Help Cancer  
July 31, 2000

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) - Locked away for more than 40 years in guarded 
concrete vaults at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory may be the key to 
a promising new therapy for cancer patients. 

The lab's 1 1/2-ton cache of weapons-grade uranium-233, until now 
considered waste, is the nation's only readily available source for a 
potent isotope that can kill leukemia cells without harming healthy 
cells. 

"It is kind of like a little bomb going off that you can target right 
to that cancer cell," the lab's program manager Jim Rushton said. 

Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York are 
developing the "alpha particle immunotherapy" and last year completed 
initial human tests. 

The isotope bismuth-213 was attached to an antibody designed to carry 
the alpha-emitting isotope to the cancer. The tests were to see if the 
treatment did more harm than good in acute myeloid leukemia patients. 

The results were a surprise. Not only was the therapy safe, but 
leukemia cells were eliminated in the blood stream and reduced in the 
bone marrow of 13 of the 18 patients taking part, said Dr. Joseph 
Jurcic, one of the researchers. 

"We really think it has broad implications for the whole field of 
oncology, not just for leukemia," he said. 

The researchers don't envision bismuth therapy replacing chemotherapy 
or surgery. Rather they see its potential in "cleaning up residual 
cancer cells that are remaining behind after primary treatments," he 
said. 

This is no small challenge. Jurcic said only 30 percent to 40 percent 
of acute leukemia patients are cured by chemotherapy. 

"The majority of these patients go into remission with chemotherapy, 
but they relapse because of these residual cells. That's where we think 
the bismuth is going to be particularly useful." 

This fall, Sloan-Kettering, under the watch of the National Cancer 
Institute, plans to start a second phase of testing with 35 to 40 
patients to measure the therapy's effectiveness. The trials could last 
three years. 

"The advantage of alpha-emitters is that they deposit a large amount of 
energy in a very small area of tissue," said Dr. Jorge Carrasquillo, 
deputy chief of nuclear medicine at the National Institutes of Health. 

Attaching the bismuth to antibodies that can carry the radiation dose 
straight to diseased cells is an "innovative treatment," and Sloan-
Kettering is leading the way, he said. 

"Of course it is too early to tell the final role," Carrasquillo 
said, "but it certainly is a strategy worth pursuing." 

The problem was getting more bismuth-213, an exotic isotope with a 46-
minute half-life, which makes it perfect for injecting into patients 
because it quickly dissipates but makes it difficult to acquire. 

Bismuth-213 can be obtained in what physicists describe as a decay 
chain from uranium-233. First, thorium-229 is extracted, then actinium-
225 is taken from that and then the bismuth is extracted from the 
actinium. 

The search for thorium led to the uranium-233 stockpile in Oak Ridge. 

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson agreed last month at the behest of 
Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., and Rep. Joe Knollenberg, R-Mich., to 
double the supply of bismuth-213 by 2002 for the Sloan-Kettering 
research. 

Rushton said only 1 percent of the available bismuth-213 has been 
recovered from Oak Ridge. The total of bismuth-213 there is 
infinitesimally small - so small that it is measured by its 
radioactivity instead of its weight. 

A typical shipment to Sloan-Kettering "is literally a spot of material 
that is dried in the bottom of a vial. It looks like the vial is 
empty," Rushton said. 

But researchers believe there is enough high-powered bismuth-213 at Oak 
Ridge to treat up to 100,000 cancer patients a year. 

Oak Ridge's uranium-233 was made at the government's weapons fuel 
production plants in South Carolina and Washington state in the 1950s 
and 1960s. However, it was never intended for bombs, rather to fuel 
commercial nuclear plants. 

At the time, uranium sources were scarce and nuclear power generation 
looked full of promise. 

"But nuclear power did not grow as rapidly as the too-cheap-to-meter 
advocates had said, and people found all kinds of uranium out there," 
Rushton said. "The price fell and the economic need for this as an 
alternative fuel never developed." 

And so the uranium-233, considered more hazardous than enriched uranium 
for weapons - which also is stored in Oak Ridge - has remained at the 
Oak Ridge lab complex. It costs $15 million a year to store, and some 
experts estimate it will cost even more to dispose of. 

Although the bismuth extraction will not reduce the volume of uranium-
233, it at least gives value to the uranium's manufacture, Rushton 
said. 

"We spent a lot of money making this stuff," he said. "If we had 
disposed of all this 10 years ago, we wouldn't have the option to look 
at bismuth-213 today." 

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 
 

What about the theory that radiation *causes* cancer?

Some people have genes that are susceptible to radiation and are more likely
to get breast cancer if irradiated, but most are not.

I've had hodgkins lymphoma.... I'm in remission now.. and luckly.. I haven't
had radiation therapy.. Just heavy doses of chemotherapy.. With drugs that
could easily destroy any living matter unless injected directly into my
bloodstream like they are... I don't like the prospect of  being injected with
weapons degraded anything.
chemotherapy is enough of a battle for most

Lots of my family members died of cancer - parents, uncles, aunts, cousin.
No breast cancer except the aunt, who was 86, just kidney, brain, prostate,
stomach, colon, Hodgkin's lymphoma.  I have been lucky so far.

Someone I work for just had a second recurrence of a stage-zero duct carcinoma
in situ, a very early very small form of breast cancer .2 cm in size, which
was removed by surgery.  She now has to decide whether to undergo radiation
therapy, which will reduce the chance of recurrence from 20 to 10% but can
have lots of unpleasant side effects such as lung and heart damage, and/or
tamoxifen, an estrogen blocker which can kill you with blood clots and cause
other forms of cancer.

What experience have grexers or there relatives had with these forms of
treatment, and if you were her, would you undergo them or not?  She is a
medical translator and has done lots of research.  There is a new type of more
focussed radiation treatment that takes a week instead of 5 weeks.  

How old?  My impression is that the common reproductive tissue cancers
(breast, prostate, etc.) tend to be far more likely to come back & kill
in younger patients.  "...second recurrence" does not sound very good.
Is this an estrogen-sensitive cancer for ovarectomy to be a meaningful
option?  The focused radiation *may* greatly reduce heart/lung/etc.
damage.  My impression is that diet & lifestyle are very big determiners
of risk for breast cancer - immediate radical changes may be advisable.

Yes on estrogen sensitive, age post menopause, and they have decided against
radiation and for tamoxifen, which is anti-estrogen.  Her diet and lifestyle
and family history are all healthy, she says, and she gets lots of exercise.
Non smoker, rarely drinks.  Only half the cancers, or less, are found in
people at high risk.  Actually it was a first recurrence (second time in the
same location).  
Tamoxifen for five years minimum.  She has been promised all the symptoms of
menopause whether or not she already went through them.  Fun.  At least they
will not be poking 25 holes a day in her for 5 weeks, for radiation.

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