Side Effects of Chemotherapy

Cancer is the twentieth century greatest enemy of all besides AIDS. Very many people lose their beloved ones to this illness and very many are still struggling with chemotherapy treatment as it is followed by the people they love. Understanding what cancer patients go through while following chemotherapy is very difficult but reading about it may shed a bit of light on how to help and comfort these patients. To begin with, chemotherapy side effects are aspects that patients deal with and find very difficult to handle.

Chemotherapy side effects are very numerous and vary in strength depending on the dosage of drugs and the length of the treatment. Most chemotherapy side effects are short term ones as they seem to completely go away once the therapy is stopped. Very rarely, there are encountered some effects that are long term or that may appear only years after following a certain treatment.

If you were interested in finding out more about the chemotherapy side effects of various treatments or combinations of drugs, you should know that there are a great deal of sources providing you with relevant information helpful in alleviating and understanding the pain the patient goes through. The list with potential chemotherapy side effects is about 200 items long and it includes such effects as abdominal pain, dizziness, nausea, chills, cardio-toxicity, edema, eye problems, lack of appetite, weight gain or loss, memory loss, leukemia, infections of various types in various parts of the body, nose bleeds, pulmonary embolus, pneumonia, rapid heartbeat, water retention, and so on. Going through such a list will surely turn out quite discouraging but you ought to know that these chemotherapy side effects will not appear all at once and in the same patient. They are each specific to a certain type of cancer and are definitely related to the type of drug or combination of drugs that the doctor has recommended as treatment.

Most cancer patients are explained by their doctors what chemotherapy side effects there may appear while following the treatment offered and how long they are going to persist, if so, once the treatment is stopped. Explaining what the patient will go through is very important as this will avoid having the patient panic about something that is usually associated with certain drugs. Most often, doctors consult their patients about the treatment they are to prescribe and may give patients options between treatments presenting the specific chemotherapy side effects and balancing them altogether.

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