Quotes & Sayings About Chemotherapy

I couldn't possibly lead the kind of life I lead, and keep the schedule that I do, having radiation or chemotherapy. — Nancy Reagan

The survival rate of Dr Burton's patients approximately doubled the maximum survival rate of conventionally treated patients. Had these findings pertained to a chemotherapy drug instead of IAT, massive amounts of funding would have been allocated to investigate the drug. Once again, the politics of cancer barred a potentially valuable treatment from reaching the public. — Jared Diamond

For so long, the mainstays of cancer treatment have been chemotherapy and radiation. They're toxic and primitive. We need to look at it in a rational way and say, how can we help the body heal itself? — Eva Vertes

Many of my patients continued to smoke, often furtively, during their treatment for cancer (I could smell the acrid whiff of tobacco on their clothes as they signed the consent forms for chemotherapy). — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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I had three sessions of chemotherapy so it was really tough, it was hard to go through it. But while I was going through my treatment, I was always motivated that I was going to come back and play for India. I think that's what kept me going and got me through. — Yuvraj Singh

When I was going through my chemotherapy, I realized not many people are willing to talk about cancer, even after getting fully cured. Celebrities and educated people are also very protective and private about it. I still haven't understood why. I decided to fight my battle out in the public. — Yuvraj Singh

Robert Sandler is a child who died when he was three years old, and he is a child who was the first child that we know of to be treated with chemotherapy. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Everything was going for me, I didn't even know the meaning of the word insecurity and suddenly I am surrounded by words like operation, cancer, chemotherapy, radiation. — Delta Goodrem

Insects leave (Madagascar periwinkle) Catharanthus roseus out of their diets. So, for that matter, do deer. The reason is that the plants are loaded with alkaloids so potent that they are the source of vincristine and vinblastine. These are drugs important in routines of chemotherapy for treating Hodgkin's disease and certain forms of leukemia ... — Allen Lacy

In a spiritual sense, a positive attitude may help you get through chemotherapy and surgery and radiation and what have you. But a positive mental attitude does not cure cancer - any more than a negative mental attitude causes cancer. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Initially, after David's diagnosis, I would cringe when I read
books or articles by cancer survivors who stated that cancer had
been a gift in their lives. How could all that David endured be
viewed as a gift? The invasive surgery, the weeks of chemotherapy
and radiation: a gift?
Yet, after the cancer, David would often reach for my hand and
say, "If it is cancer that is responsible for our new relationship, then
it was all worth it." And I'd reluctantly agree that cancer had been a
gift in our lives. We'd both seen the other alternative: patients and
survivors who had become bitter and angry, and neither one of us
wanted to become that. — Mary Potter Kenyon

Can any of us pinpoint the moment when we've lost our younger selves, lost joy in the simple things, stopped celebrating life? For years-decades-we work, raise a family, plant begonias. Then one day we wake up to chemotherapy and eulogies and nursing home visits and the realization that we haven't had a real vacation in years. And all we can do is ask: how did life get so hard? — Cheryl Jarvis

I used to take someone with me for the chemotherapy so I could do jokes. You always try and find something absurd. — Jennifer Saunders

I have friends who are going through chemotherapy, and they make the darkest, most hideous cancer jokes you've ever heard. — Kathy Griffin

It is very easy for me to imagine in 200 years, people looking back at chemotherapy as proof that people of the 20th century were insane and just morons. — Chuck Klosterman

I've tried to imagine how she'd feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I'm pretty sure that she - like most of us - would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body. — Rebecca Skloot

Cancer has taught me a lot of things. Maybe it is the best thing that has happened to me. I can't say right now, but maybe some years down the line, I would realise. When I was taking chemotherapy, there were a lot of elderly patients, and that would inspire me. I thought, 'If they can be cured, why can't I be?' — Yuvraj Singh

Dieter said softly, 'My doctor's love is as important to me as his chemotherapy, but he does not know.' Dieter's statement meant a great deal to me. I had not known either. For a long time, I had carried the belief that as a physician my love didn't matter and the only thing of value I had to offer was my knowledge and skill. My training had argued me out of my truth. Medicine is as close to love as it is to science, and its relationships matter even at the edge of life itself. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Every lawyer shall tell his or her client that becoming involved with the legal system is like three years of experimental chemotherapy, one hundred percent guaranteed not to work. — Lawrence Joseph

Aside from certain rare cancers, it is not possible to detect any sudden changes in the death rates for any of the major cancers that could be credited to chemotherapy. Whether any of the common cancers can be cured by chemotherapy has yet to be established. — John Cairns

Two to 4% of cancers respond to chemotherapy ... The bottom line is for a few kinds of cancer chemo is a life extending procedure-Hodgkin's disease, Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL), Testicular cancer, and Choriocarcinoma. — Ralph W. Moss

If it's all true, then we're in the citadel of unbelief, where nightmares are dispatched with Lysol and scalpels and chemotherapy rather than with stakes and Bibles and wild mountain thyme. — Stephen King

In 1975, the respected British medical journal Lancet reported on a study which compared the effect on cancer patients of (1) a single chemotherapy, (2) multiple chemotherapy, and (3) no treatment at all. No treatment 'proved a significantly better policy for patients' survival and for quality of remaining life.' — Barry Lynes

She wished she had cancer instead. She'd trade Alzheimer's for cancer in a heartbeat. She felt ashamed for wishing this, and it was certainly a pointless bargaining, but she permitted herself the fantasy anyway. With cancer, she'd have something to fight. There was surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. There was the chance that she could win. Her family and the community at Harvard would rally behind her battle and consider it noble. And even if it defeated her in the end, she'd be able to look them knowingly in the eye and say good-bye before she left. — Lisa Genova

A study of over 10,000 patients shows clearly that chemo's supposedly strong track record with Hodgkin's disease (lymphoma) is actually a lie. Patients who underwent chemo were 14 times more likely to develop leukemia and 6 times more likely to develop cancers of the bones, joints, and soft tissues than those patients who did not undergo chemotherapy . — John Diamond

The medication I had to take was a form of chemotherapy. You feel like death every day. No appetite. No energy. But the treatment worked. It cured my liver 80 per cent but compromised my kidneys. — Natalie Cole

It's the closest to death I have ever been. The chemotherapy takes you as far down into hell as you've ever, ever been. — Melissa Etheridge

Before I started chemotherapy treatments, I wrote down the best advice from doctors, family, friends, books, and survivors and created an 'Owner's Manual' to help me take care of myself. It would remind me that cancer is doable. — Regina Brett

Not the difference between treating and doing nothing, she explained. The difference was in the priorities. In ordinary medicine, the goal is to extend life. We'll sacrifice the quality of your existence now - by performing surgery, providing chemotherapy, putting you in intensive care - for the chance of gaining time later. Hospice deploys nurses, doctors, chaplains, and social workers to help people with a fatal illness have the fullest possible lives right now - — Atul Gawande

I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don't read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent solider is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water. — Christopher Hitchens

Chemotherapy tests your sanity. — Melissa Etheridge

Chemotherapy isn't easy. I felt very fortunate I wouldn't have to go through that. — Jaclyn Smith

The cancer I had is not at all equal to other people's cancer. I've never had to have chemotherapy; I haven't had to have a mastectomy. — Jennifer Grey

Fate had dedicated that love's path would not run smoothly. Katie kept a secret from her husband and can they survive this? She had a lump in her breast. She was terrified it was cancer; her mum had died of it. A month later she got so sick she collapsed and had to be hospitalized. Tests revealed she had inoperable cancer. Surgery was no use nor was chemotherapy or radiography — Annette J. Dunlea

In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we 'battle' cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation. If we are fortunate, we 'beat' the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having 'succumbed after a long battle.' — Abraham Verghese

Chemotherapy takes its toll; the more you keep doing it, you lose your energy, and it gets more difficult to swallow. — Michael Douglas

I have heard one doctor call high-protein, high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets "make-yourself-sick" diets, and I think that's an appropriate moniker. You can also lose weight by undergoing chemotherapy or starting a heroin addiction, but I wouldn't recommend those, either. — T. Colin Campbell

People always talk about the nausea that comes with chemotherapy. For me, it's more like a queasiness. And it can be intense. It's an uncomfortable, gross kind of 'blech' feeling. — Stuart Scott

Chemotherapy isn't good for you. — Christopher Hitchens

One of the side effects of (surgery, anesthesia,) X-ray ... , and chemotherapy, is the suppression ... of the patient's immunological defenses ... A simple cold often leads to the death from pneumonia - and ('pneumonia') is what appears on the death certificate, not cancer. — G. Edward Griffin

People tell you you're having chemotherapy, but there are different types of chemotherapy, and you don't know which one you're going to get and how it's going to affect you. The people in the hospitals don't always have time to help you understand it. — Sam Taylor-Johnson

Medicine has changed greatly in the last decades. Widespread vaccinations have practically eradicated many illnesses, at least in western Europe and the United States. The use of chemotherapy, especially the antibiotics, has contributed to an ever decreasing number of fatalities in infectious diseases. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

There are three types of chemotherapy that work for cancer. Testicular, like Lance Armstrong. Childhood leukemia, they're doing great things. And lymphoma and non-Hodgkin's. — Suzanne Somers

The doctor explained that this type of relapse occurred in less than ten percent of childhood leukemia patients, and that Megan would require frequent spinal taps to inject chemotherapy drugs directly into her cerebrospinal fluid. — Julianne MacLean

The problem of chemotherapy of bacterial infections could be solved neither by the experimental medical research worker nor by the chemist alone, but only by the two together working in very close cooperation over many years. — Gerhard Domagk

I look upon cancer in the same way that I look upon heart disease, arthritis, high blood pressure, or even obesity, for that matter, in that by dramatically strengthening the body's immune system through diet, nutritional supplements, and exercise, the body can rid itself of the cancer, just as it does in other degenerative diseases. Consequently, I wouldn't have chemotherapy and radiation because I'm not interested in therapies that cripple the immune system, and, in my opinion, virtually ensure failure for the majority of cancer patients. — Julian Whitaker

Well, at least you'll get some down time to heal up before the chemo. Of course, that sounds kind of like in The Princess Bride when they heal Westley up before they torture him. — Abigail Barnette

That's a tumor. It goes across my liver, up through my lungs, all the way around my heart. And when they were done trying to cut it out, nuke it out with radiation and chemotherapy it out, it left so much scar tissue that when I walk outside now in cold weather and take a deep breath, it feels like someone is stabbing me. — Eric Massa

If cancer specialists were to admit publicly that chemotherapy is of limited usefulness and is often dangerous, the public might demand a radical change in direction-possibly toward unorthodox and nontoxic methods, and toward cancer prevention ... The use of chemotherapy is even advocated by those members of the establishment who realize how ineffective and dangerous it can be. — Ralph W. Moss

Are you scared?"
"Of what?"
"Dying." Jemma was nothing, if she was not blunt.
"I'm not expecting to die, Jemma. I'm expecting to have treatment, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, whatever it takes, but I'm expecting to come through this. — Calvin Wade

Chemotherapy is such a hard, hard kiss. Anything we can do to alleviate its side effects should be intelligently explored with an open mind. — Diane Ladd

Chemotherapy's success record is dismal. It can achieve remissions in about 7% of all human cancers; for an additional 15% of cases, survival can be "prolonged" beyond the point at which death would be expected without treatment. This type of survival is not the same as a cure or even restored quality of life. — John Diamond

It reminded Lacy of running into someone you hadn't seen for a while, and finding her bald and missing her eyebrows: you knew she was in the throes of chemotherapy, but pretended you didn't, because it was easier that way for both of you. — Jodi Picoult

An unhealthy life is destined to end with an unhealthy death. — Nancy S. Mure

I'm happy to tell you that having been through surgery and chemotherapy and radiation, breast cancer is officially behind me. I feel absolutely great and I am raring to go. — Carly Fiorina

Chemotherapy and radiotherapy will make the ancient method of drilling holes in a patient's head to permit the escape of demons look relatively advanced ... Toxic chemotherapy is a hoax. The doctors who use it are guilty of pre-meditated murder, and the use of cobalt and other methods of cancer treatment popular today effectively closes the door on cure. — Ernst T. Krebs

Dad's cancer experience included periods of relatively good health as well as bouts of hospitalisation as he coursed his way through a variety of different chemotherapy treatments. — Amy Hoggart

For most people, chemotherapy is no longer the chamber of horrors we often conceive it to be. Yes, it is an ordeal for some people, but it wasn't for me, nor for most of the patients I got to know during my four months of periodic visits to the chemo suite. — Geraldine Brooks

It's like they say about soldiers coming back from war. People all around you are dying. Really dying, Eric. You go in for a week's chemotherapy and you're in a ward with people who are really, actually dying, there and then and doing their best to come to terms with it. When the week's up, you go home and you see your family and your friends and everything's normal and familiar. It's too much. You think - one world can't possibly hold both these lives and you feel like you're going to go crazy when you realise the world is that big and it can fill with the most terrible things whenever it wants to. — Steven Hall

I simply cannot see how denying chemotherapy treatment for Palestinian children increases Israel's security or advances U.S. national interests. — Lois Capps

I've got corporate executives, my bosses ... this is true ... who will text message me ... and say, 'Hey a, heard you had chemotherapy today, want me to stop by and pick you up something to eat and bring it to you?' Whose boss does that? My bosses do that. — Stuart Scott

One day, I had a patient who was going through chemotherapy who came to me and said, 'I'm going to go on with what I'm doing, but I need you to tell me what it is that I'm fighting.' — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Chemotherapy can be a long, tough haul - for me, it went on for six months - and the best doctors and nurses become, if only for that period of time, as essential in your life as friends or spouses. — Julia Glass

A noted cancer specialist in Boston said he believed that if some simple and inexpensive replacement for Chemotherapy for the treatment of cancer were found tomorrow, all US medical schools would teeter on the verge of bankruptcy, so integral a part of their hospital revenues is oncology, the medical specialty of cancer treatment — Barry Lynes

I used homeopathy, acupuncture, yoga and meditation in conjunction with my chemotherapy to help me get stronger again after the cancer. I also chanted with Buddhist friends and prayed with Christian friends. I covered all my bases. — Olivia Newton-John

And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records. — Chuck Klosterman

If we didn't kill the tumor, we killed the patient. - William Moloney on the early days of chemotherapy — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Chemotherapy is just medieval. It's such a blunt instrument. We're going to look back on it like we do the dark ages. — Eric Topol

A study was done which shows the majority of oncologists who refer patients for chemotherapy for lung cancer would not themselves take chemotherapy for lung cancer. And in fact if the chemotherapy involved cis-platen, something like 75% of them said they wouldn't take it. But what do these people do all day long? They're sending people for cis-platen. — Ralph W. Moss

I have to say that after chemotherapy, Barbara Boxer just isn't that scary anymore. — Barbara Boxer

Chemotherapy isn't good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, 'Well that is a good thing because it's supposed to be poison. If it's making the tumor feel this queasy, then I'm OK with it.' — Christopher Hitchens

I had a prostatectomy in the fall and fortunately it was encapsulated and I didn't have to go through chemotherapy. — Steve Garvey

If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with sensible diet and exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever. — Wallace Stegner

When I had my cancer, the chemotherapy took my hair away. So then I decided I would just keep it short, and this is my signature now. The great thing about it is that I am a bit of a chameleon, so you can put a wig on me and I look totally different. — Anthony Warlow

If people really knew what they were getting into with their third chemotherapy treatment, or getting a pacemaker when they're 92, if they really knew what that was going to mean, they might say no, and we should give them that information. — Caitlin Doughty

The chemotherapy was very peculiar, something that makes you feel much worse than the cancer itself, a very nasty thing. I used to go to treatment on my own, and nearly everybody else was with somebody. I wouldn't have liked that. Why would you want to make anybody sit in those places? — Maggie Smith

Why give chemotherapy or even antibiotics to people with end-stage Alzheimer's disease? Keep them pain free and clean, love them but don't automatically try to get the last technology-produced breath from them. Start a preschool program instead or do something about the atrocious state of obesity in our children. — Richard Lamm

The great success stories of chemotherapy were always in relatively obscure types of cancer. Childhood leukemia constitutes less than two percent of all cancers and many of chemotherapy's other successes were in diseases so rare that many clinicians had never even seen a single case — Ralph W. Moss

Fasting before chemotherapy is definitely something that should be implemented in our oncology wards, — Timothy Ferriss

One of the pluses of chemotherapy, she tells the volunteers, is that all her facial and body hair has gone. It's like a permanent Brazilian for free, she says. One of the minuses of chemotherapy is that all the stuff on top of her head has gone too. ("What is a Brazilian?" Sister Lucy asked the other day. Finty gulped and looked for help, but the Pearly King was studying a parcel and Barbara had lost one of her glass eyes again in her lap. "It's a sort of haircut," said Finty. "Quite short.") — Rachel Joyce

I was told by six doctors over six days that they could start me on full-body chemotherapy. And I said, "If you know where I'm coming from, I'd rather die." — Suzanne Somers

The bracelet says 'Fear Nothing.' It was given to me by my friends, and it was made for me and my friends during the period of time that I was going through chemotherapy. And I still wear it, because it's a great reminder of friendship and how my buddies and others came together in my time of need. — Joseph J. Lhota

But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient. — Stephen King

Chemotherapy is an opponent in itself - simultaneously curing you and hurting you. — Jenna Morasca

Writing isn't a source of pain. It's psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain. — Dean Koontz

Chemotherapy is brutal. The goal is pretty much to kill everything in your body without killing you. — Rashida Jones

I'd stop calling it "chemotherapy." I'd call it "transformational juice." Infusion suites would become "transformational suites" or "journey rooms." — Eve Ensler

For a couple of days after chemotherapy, food tastes really bland, even the best foods. I haven't been sick, but have been a little tired. I haven't lost any weight. — Grete Waitz

I think one possibility [in the future] might be chemotherapy. And I'm always hesitant to say that because it makes it sound like I'm against chemotherapy. Right now, chemotherapy is the best cancer treatment therapy we have. But let's say we find some way where we can almost genetically engineer the DNA of our being and fight cancer that way. Then, the idea that we used to pump poison into people to fight off cancer will almost seem like the use of leeches or something. — Chuck Klosterman

sutures, bandages, antibiotics Mop Sucking chest wound Anesthesia, surgery Cork Cancer Chemotherapy, radiation, surgery Casket wreath* 13 Diabetes Insulin Leeches* 14 Hatchet embedded in skull Removal of hatchet, treatment of wound Larger hat Eyes gouged out in hospital by psychopath posing as nurse Prosthetic eyeballs, therapy Six-pack Source: — Dave Barry