Look around you, all you see are sympathetic eyes

I read an article during the week about young people blogging about their lives with Cancer and an alarming thought came upon me. At 32 I can't really in all honesty classify myself as a young man and it's now been nine years since I had any trace of Cancer in my body.

So why is it that I still classify myself as a Cancer patient?

I think that, despite my feelings about it for a good few years, I have come to terms with the fact that it's always going to define my life and that's been a very difficult process. I was so adamant that I would have a life after Cancer that had no hangover from it at all but I had to slowly come around to the fact that while the Cancer had gone the treatments needed to rid me of it had done some serious damage and it's that damage that makes me still associate myself with Cancer.

The reason that so much damage was done is because of the nature of the treatments deployed to treat Cancer. Consider how much of a treatment that it takes to kill you as well as the amount that it takes to produce the desired effect and think of these as the lethal dose and the therapeutic dose. In any normal, everyday treatments the difference between these two doses (called the therapeutic index science nerds) is large and so they are safe to use. So the therapeutic index is like the safety margin. The issue with Cancer treatments is that to be effective the therapeutic dose is alarmingly close to the lethal dose and so the therapeutic index is very small so there is little safety margin. Of course where Cancer is concerned the use of such dangerous treatments is pretty much because without treatment the patient will die anyway so it is worth taking the risk.

What it also means though is that other things get damaged because as well as having extreme therapeutic effects they also have extreme side effects. That's where most of the damage is done.

I never kept a blog at the time but I did write about many aspects of my treatment and in the next little bit I plan to go through the whole bone marrow transplant procedure with you. Hope you enjoy it.