NSHD: Nodular sclerosing Hodgkin's disease, a lymphoma.

Next there's the physical fatigue of treatment. I spent three nights in the hospital after my surgery, and that was the time I experienced fatigue that's beyond fatigue, a fatigue so palpable it seems you could touch it. I wanted to shrivel into the fetal curl of a woolly-bear caterpillar, spin a cocoon of sleep and tell my doctors to wake me when it was time to leave. I learned that sleep is bliss, that sleep heals, that sleep is the essential post-op drug.

I also dozed off where I least expected to. During radiation, I sometimes napped inside the TomoTherapy machine, lulled in my lassitude by Pink Floyd and Metallica. It was the radiation, which lasted more than seven weeks, that resulted in the most profound fatigue.

-- Dana Jennings

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and many other cancer survivors, money is tight and going back to work a financial necessity. But one of the first big analyses to examine employment rates among American and European cancer survivors has found that they are at significantly higher risk for joblessness than healthy counterparts.

The report, appearing Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is an analysis of previously published studies. After accounting for variations in data among those studies, it concluded that cancer survivors in the United States and Europe were 37 percent more likely to be unemployed than healthy peers. In the United States, where it is particularly critical for survivors to hold on to jobs, because they provide health insurance, cancer patients may be at even greater risk of unemployment than patients in Europe, the study suggested.

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Doxorubicin aka Adriamycin causes heart damage.

According to the University Medical Center at the University
of Groningen in the Netherlands researchers, the damage to
the heart from some cancer drugs is a well known fact but
this is the first long-term study to track the effects of cancer
drugs on the heart that might occur years later.

As a resut of this study, researchers recommend that all
patients treated with drugs known as anthracyclines have
life-long heart function monitoring. They emphasis, even
with the study findings, that doxorubicin is a highly effective
cancer treatment. In addition, today's cancer patients tend
to receive lower doses of these cancer drugs, and
cardioprotective drugs, such as dexrazoxane, were not
available to cancer patients in the past.

Continue reading "Doxorubicin and heart damage" »

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ZOFRAN is administered to those who feel sick
during two days following chemotherapy.

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(following Neulasta shot fri 1pm)
pain rt leg sat 2-8 pm  2 tylenol
2005 june Sat ~25

NEULASTA

A common adverse effect of chemotherapy, febrile neutropenia can be life-threatening. The FDA has approved Neulasta (pegfilgrastim) to boost production of infection-fighting white blood cells (WBC) in patients with nonmyeloid malignancies who are receiving immunosuppressive anticancer drugs. Administered as a single injection during each chemotherapy cycle, Neulasta has an advantage over Neupogen (filgrastim), the only other drug available for this indication. Neupogen is given daily during chemotherapy.

Although similar to Neupogen, Neulasta has had a polyethylene glycol molecule ("PEG" unit) added to enlarge its filgrastim molecules. This extends the drugs half-life and prolongs its beneficial effects in the body. Drug clearance is regulated by neutrophils, so the drug remains in the blood while the patient needs itwhen he's neutropenic-and clears rapidly when neutrophil levels rise.

In clinical trials, the new drug was well tolerated and safe. The most common adverse reaction was
bone pain, which in most cases responded to nonnarcotic analgesics.

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