How is cancer so deadly but a person feels fine one day then the next they are told they have 4 months to live?
In: Biology
Most of what makes people feel bad when sick actually comes from the body’s immune system fighting the infection, not the infection itself. When invaders are detected the body will do things like creating huge amounts of mucus to push foreign material out, inflaming the affected area leading to irritation and coughing, creating a fever to make their reproduction more difficult, etc. All that makes you feel horrible but slows down the infection to allow the body to fight it properly. Much of the time this is an overreaction for what is actually needed, but the body can’t know what infection will actually kill you.
In the case of cancer the problem is the body’s own cells. The body doesn’t even know anything is wrong so it doesn’t mount a defense that makes you feel bad. It is also why curing cancer is so hard; how do you kill all of certain parts of you without killing all of you?
With bacteria they are different enough that antibiotics can be used that kill bacteria very well and human cells not very well. With cancer anything we come up with that kills cancer cells will also kill your normal cells. Our best options only kill cancer a bit faster than they kill your good cells, making the treatment terrible to undergo. But if you don’t treat in that way your body continues on blissfully unaware and unreacting… until it can’t.
Exponential growth. At first cancer is a single malformed cell dividing without restrictions. That 1 turns into 2, 2 becomes 4, 4 becomes 8, 8 turns into 16, etc. With each division the number of cancerous cells doubles. (More or less)
So for the first few months or so the cancer is only a minor disruption, but soon it rapidly becomes larger and larger and starts affecting the function of the entire organ and body. Taking up nutrients and putting stress on other organs causing cascading organ failures if left untreated.
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Just to add to the other answers, when a Doctor tells someone they have X amount of time, it’s usually a highly educated guesstimate as there are so many unknowable factors based on the individual that affect survival rate.
So you hear stories of “I knew someone that was told he had a week to live and he lasted two years” – the Doctor would have been making their prediction based on their personal clinical experience combined with data from studies in journals, etc.
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