What if I need chemotherapy? What does that mean, and how will it help me?
Chemotherapy is the use of medications to fight cancer, using drugs to kill cancer cells. The challenge of finding chemotherapeutic medications is that they must be able to destroy the cancer without hurting the patient. Since cancers are comprised of rapidly dividing cells, chemotherapy is aimed at rapidly dividing cells. There are normal areas in the body with rapidly dividing cells, and these are the areas that give patients trouble while they are on chemotherapy. There are rapidly dividing cells in your gastrointestinal tract, the roots of your hair, the lining of your mouth, your bone marrow, and your reproductive organs (ovaries or testicles). Side effects are usually due to damage in those areas.
There is no perfect chemotherapy. The best agents stop cancer while causing side effects that can be managed and tolerated for most people.
Chemotherapy is often given after surgery for pleural mesothelioma. After peritoneal mesothelioma, chemotherapy may be given into the abdomen or by vein. Chemotherapy can get to the cells that the doctors could not remove, or could not see, as well as any cancer cells that may have travelled beyond the surgical site. Sometimes chemotherapy is given before surgery to make the tumor smaller and the surgery easier.
If your mesothelioma is not amenable to surgical treatment, either because of the spread and location of the tumor or because the doctors do not think you are strong enough to withstand a difficult surgical procedure, chemotherapy will probably the treatment of choice for you.
Initial treatments of mesothelioma with common chemotherapy agents did not yield a lot of success. However, there are now good treatment regiments usually involving two chemotherapeutic medicines.